The Hanging Tree
by phantomwriter05
Summary: In the aftermath of THE WAR to end all wars, a brutal lynching draws lines to a larger conspiracy of hatred and prejudice amongst veteran rebels. While many years in the past, three slayings come to the attention of John Connor when they connect to a time traveling predator that might be hunting his Cyborg protector. SPECIAL EDITION: Reedited, Reinserted Chapters, and Repolished.
1. Chapter 1

_From the first moment of blinking eyes, the first swell of oxygen in our lungs, the first sign of life, one asks the same questions: What is it that makes humanity? Is it the capacity to form sentences, our empathy, or is it our cruelty? What makes humanity a better breed of animal, or the worst? Some say it's our civilized nature. But for many, even in this time period as before, it may come to another conclusion. A shark rips apart its mate, a lion breeds with many. Yet, humans, the ultimate predator, put so much of their life and personal stock in the pursuit of love. The idea, the attachment, the condition in which the best and worst are brought out in us, it's a feeling seldom felt by anything else in this known universe. In the human mind is the compulsion and infatuation to never again seek another. That mind, body, and soul is captured and kept in a symbolic, emotionally symbiotic relationship that lasts a lifetime. In essence, it is love that makes us human and yet, by the same token, what your worth is judged upon as a member of the species. _

_If you cannot choose who you love, and yet it's so important in your identity, when do you stop becoming human when what you love cannot feel the same? But perhaps the better, and by far the most important, question to civilization is certainly this. _

_When something loves what it shouldn't, does it make it a miracle or an abomination? _

**Detective Stories: Black Case Book**

_The Hanging Tree_

The darkening sky was like a water painting on a master's canvas. The twinkling sparkles on a soft silk fabric in a wicked black loomed and pressed above the last fires of the sun being snuffed in the west. Its fading orange and violet glow was reflected in the sheen of wispy clouds like a trail of smoke marking the fading legacy of warmth supplied from a blown out candle. In the last throws of light, shadows began creeping back into a world caught in the ominous limbo of the last of the western heat clinging to the ground. The gentle breeze of the Pacific whispered in its quietest of tomes of the cold that would accompany the passing of the witching hour of this dark night.

On top of a solitary hill on the outskirts of hundreds of miles of ruined concrete, rusted metal, and burned out towers stood a great apple tree. Untouched by the deforestation of the great urban jungle below, this solitary tree stood a silent sentry over the many years of sorrow and death. The nourishment of its branches provided life for those who found it in their desperation. Its trunk gave support and rest to the weary, and its roots hid faithfully the secrets of two brothers that they exchanged beneath its soil. They, like so many in those days of suffering and uncertainty of the very hour being the last of a species, called it "The Tree of Life". It was a rumor and legend that to eat from its branches would bring you good fortune in those horrible times.

Now, joined amongst the red fruit, hung a different silhouette that twisted awkwardly in the salty breeze. Its presence amongst the scarcest and most sacred of this suffering world's commodity profaned the very name that so many had come to call it. Blank caramel eyes looked pained and frozen in fear as they looked out over the mountain ranges behind the grids of concrete stumps and ruined streets. They were ignorant and unresponsive to the dark figure standing against the paint background. It watched at the tree's base while the lifeless body swung to and fro with an ominous creek of buckling wood.

Cowled with a hood, leather coat fluttering in the exceedingly frigid breeze, the figure's hardened eyes watched the body with an acquired grimness. He turned his head in study for a long moment. This quiet observer was tall and athletically built. A well-worn double breasted coat the color of mahogany and a crimson lined dark hoody covered a deceptively strong frame. The man reached into a utility bandolier buckled across his chest under the coat.

THUNK!

A four pointed throwing star was let fly with a snap of an arm. The thin razor sharp blades made from coltan cut the hangman's noose with one elegant spin. The electrified weapon released its deadly charge ineffectively against the thick wood. When released the stiff body hit the ground like a warped board of wood.

Dusty, grime covered motorcycle boots puffed over the ash strewn soil at the base of the tree. Reaching into his coat pocket, the man extracted a chaffed handle of black rubber. A matching blade snicked with a press of the button to reveal an inherited tactical knife, older than the man himself. With the body face down in the dust, he began effortlessly sawing off the budgie rope that tied its hands behind. Arms freed, the man stood and used the tip of his old boot to turn the body over. Shadowed eyes seared the fragile face in his mind. He knelt next to the body, bowing his head as a knight to a crucifix. The figure had been taught long ago that there should be just a beat of silence, a reserved respect for the loss of something venerable, a nod to the innocent fallen. It lasts only for a fleeting moment

Then it's time to begin.

Immediately he noticed that there was no sign, no notification of what this man did to earn this fate. Had he been a criminal, a sign would've been nailed to the trunk, or hung around his neck labeling the crime in which he had committed. Desertion, rape, and murder where the only three hanging offenses. The absence of any cause meant that he had been slayed in the manner of punishment for at least one of the crimes he is a victim of himself, Ironic.

The dead man was tall, slender, and handsome despite a broken face that suggested attendance to an Irish wedding. He looked to be Hispanic, most likely Latino in origin, possibly South America; his nose and brow line suggested origins in Peru. He looked to be in his early forties from the wrinkled edges of his mouth, thinning face, and whiting hair. The cowled figure picked up one of the Peruvian's hands. The dead man's palm was calloused from splinters likely from griping a wooden handle. For a moment he thought the man to be a sailor from the splinters and absence from his native dwelling. But the investigating figure quickly relabeled his theory in favor of the South American being a farmer. He judged anew when pushing up his blue lips with the flat end of his knife to showcase whitened teeth from a steady diet of produce, already coupled with the rough hands coming from pushing a plow.

The murdered man was a foreign farmer, hung for no crime. What did he have that had cost him his life? His black long sleeve shirt was patched. His beige pants were dirty, sandals self-crafted. The man's knapsack was untouched where he left it leaning on the tree. It was filled with apples and spare clothing. It seems as if nothing had been taken. He had all his teeth, no fillings to be stolen. This was not done by thieves.

He began checking other wounds that were on the body. Both of the man's jaws were broken from hard blows from a fist. His ulna was cracked in two on his right arm, and his left carpus was completely shattered. They were clear defensive wounds. Gingerly, fingerless gauntleted hands lifted the man's shirt. A new prospective was reached when the figure found that the body had a history of plasma burn scars. Before he was a farmer, this man was a soldier. When he checked the shattered wrist, he was not surprised to see a bar code from Century Work Camp. He must have been one of the first soldiers to be a part of the "Land for Service" program. All soldiers that had served for more than 10 years were offered a parcel of land in the long liberated San Fernando Valley. The freedom of ownership, plus the needed market for produce, was a win-win situation for all.

But all of this new information seemed to breed more questions when put against the victim's pre-mortem injuries. The defensive wounds and subsequent soft tissue injuries, suggested that he had been attacked with a blunt, rubber club. There were three boot tread marks of feet in different sizes on his torso and broken ribs where he had been stomped on. The farmer's knuckles were lacerated from a fist fight, and his right was busted from striking something hard. Whoever jumped him got more of a fight than they were counting on. It became clear from all of these things that he was attacked, most likely ambushed, by more than one person.

Who these murderers were was simple enough to deduce from the first moment he cut the body free. The tread marks left from the sole of the boots were standard issue military grade. The defensive wounds came from a basic training weapon to teach hand to hand. The busted knuckles were consistent with the result of a bare fist against the new J22 combat body armor. But it was the rope that was the dead giveaway —bungee, high strength towing cable, machine processed. That kind of rope was Resistance issue only. When put together, this man was ambushed and killed by a group of fellow Tech-Com soldiers.

He put all his weight on his back leg, while he rested an arm over his raised knee. His other hand tugged on his chin with an arched forefinger and thumb in thought. The basic question in detection of a murder, as taught to him by his mother, was always to ask one question—_"Who gains?" _ When he closed his eyes he could still hear the stoic innocence of the beauty's voice. It was the best question to ask in any circumstance. But with the absence of any evidence to the contrary this death, like so many these days, seemed unnecessary. What did these soldiers have to gain from killing this man? What did he have or do to earn such a terrible end?

His assassins beat him viciously, which at any one point could be for any myriad of reasons. He gave reproach or insult. There was a past hatred, grudges, or blood vendettas. All of these seemed like a valid reason for the beating. But … why hang a man? Why not just beat him to death in your passion? They also used a bungee cord. Any man about to be hung hopes that the fall would break his neck, killing him instantly. But with the type of rope his killers used, it would almost be impossible to break a neck. They wanted him to suffer, wanted him to die slowly, coughing on his last gasps of air in his burning lungs. The brutality had all the makings of a hate crime, but without a known prejudice.

"Why?" A dark voice asked the blank eyes staring up at the immerging stars above. "Who gains?" His voice was muffled behind an old blue scarf as it carried his thoughts out to the dusty plains of desert beyond the ruined tinder box of a once sparkling cityscape of a once modern civilization below.

He gave a long muffled sigh while he observed the body one more time, trying to find any clues he might have missed. He knew that in the world he lived in sometimes death had no reason. That days on the battlefield people where there yesterday and this morning, but gone tomorrow. But that was war, this … this was different. This death, this atrocity was crossing a line. There were doing things of questionable morality for survival, and then there was killing just to kill. This was the markings of cruelty that only a human can do to another, a senseless hatred that no machine, their great enemy, could ever know.

The shadowed figure once read a book that claimed that human's developed fists for no other reason than to fight … one … another …

He tilted his head in an inherited quirk when faced with the interest in his new discovery. While the dead man's left hand was flat, which allowed the figure to deduce the corpse's origins, the right was still balled in a fist that had gone chalk white. The discoloration made it easier to see the darkening crimson of the lacerations on his knuckles. But within one of these lacerations was a something embedded in the wound. It could be a thorn, a piece of gravel, or even a flake of bark. But there was a possibility …

He reached out and lifted the dead man's fist. With his other hand he dug back into his bandolier and extracted a pair of small forceps. It took several increasingly effort filled tugs to extract the sharp item from the South American born man's knuckle. On his last tug the index and middle fingers became straightened severing the nerve that the sharp object was embedded in.

Holding up the item into the last threads of light available, a grimly satisfied smirk showed in hardened eyes it was held close to. It was what he had hoped it would be. In the fight the veteran had cracked one of his killers in the mouth. He or she must have had their mouths open when he hit them. The older man broke one of his killer's teeth with his blow. In doing so a part of his attacker's tooth was embedded in the knuckle. If the former soldier put up that much of a fight, then his killers would've checked themselves into a med station close by. Anyone who had lived in this ruined, cursed world knew that no wound however small should go unattended or risk the chance of going to sleep one night and never waking up again.

It was a good start.

His silhouette was now completely covered in darkness as he stood over the body. The wind caught his coat one last time while standing in respectful attention. "Duerme en paz, hermano. La pelea terminó." He bowed low before parting with the dead soldier.

But as he turned to leave, the first strands of moonlight began to peak over the mountains behind, causing something in the corpse's now half closed fist to glint. It was tiny, but enough to catch the man's turning eyes. He halted his departure from the scene and glared in study to the shadowed outline in the middle of the pale palm. Squatting, he made use of the forceps again as picked the glittering item out of the man's hand.

Suddenly a semblance of a whole picture of this horrible murder was beginning to form in his mind. Like a terrible ship wreck rising from the ocean, a motive began to surface from the depths of the figure's mind with the presence of the tiny metallic item. The elegantly crafted ring was cheap, forged from foraged copper lining, topped with a single shimmering stone …

And two sizes too small to fit the dead man's fingers.

* * *

_Many Years Ago_

There was a certain sterile environment that could always be found in every cellphone store in the country. One might never find it in any place in the world than right in this very niche shopping establishment. In most stores such as a grocery there was a certain quality of "lived in" that was well felt. There were thousands of people a week coming and going, buying essential items for everyday life. In the hobby shops and other electronic stores there was a sense of familiarity, openness to the store. But in the Cellphone shop, there was an untouchable alienation in the colorful stands filled with the customizable and clocked up processors of the brand new models. A person going into a place like this was like a car dealership. Rarely did you leave with your first choice, if you leave with anything at all. It was a place filled with tawdry sales people fighting for commission, who liked to talk.

It was perfect.

"Just this? I got a sale on some upgraded versions."

"Nah, don't own the upgraded version …"

"What do you got?"

"2.0, pretty reliable."

"Yeah … if you don't get …"

"Electrical surges."

Both young men chuckled mirthfully at the shared knowledge that they verbalized in unison. The salesclerk, a junior at USC, thought he had a hook in his teenage counter-part. The boy had messily styled dark hair, dingy rugged clothing, hard ass look of rebellion. The handsome kid didn't look like he knew a thing about technology. They'd call him back in training "easy money." The clerk recounted the training video's advice and hoped the commission would help him on the road to taking Debbie Nicks, the first chair of the University Orchestra, to dinner on Saturday before the formal. But little did he know that the young man wasn't shopping for technology.

"It's periless, man. I tell yea. You never know when a freak electrical storm is gonna hit … that'll be thirty-six dollars."

"Yeah … I heard that you guys had a bit of one over here, yesterday … Here, fourty."

CHING!

"It was weird. But I mean it could happen anywhere you know … a couple of months ago I read one of them tore open a parked bus, like just tore it in half! Can't be too careful, especially with a 2.0 in your pocket, you know what I mean, Chief?"

"Heh, was yours as bad as that?"

"It was pretty bad, there was a construction crew in the alley over here when it hit. Apparently it appeared above them, big ball, you know … some Bill Nye shit, man. Here's four for you, recite? Bag?"

"Recite … heard it was pretty messed up."

"Yeah, one of the guys got covered in cement, got all hard around him, died of dehydration from the concrete. Another guy got his neck broken by some spooked naked homeless guy in the alley. Police came by and everything. Hell of way to go. I'd hate to be that guy's mom."

"Sounds like the same thing with the bus. Did the homeless guy steal the Worker's clothing too like that red head did with the bus driver?"

"Nah, he ran off completely buck ass nude. It's a wonder no one has caught him yet, with no clothes on and all that."

"It's Los Angeles, there's probably about half a dozen of them fitting his … description, really, nude?"

"I know, man. My brother's girlfriend works as a barista across the street. She told us she saw some hunched over naked old man ringing the cement worker till he died, and then he ran deeper into the alley."

"This one, right here?"

"Yeah …"

"Sounds nuts."

"You know what's nuts, you still carrying that 2.0 model …"

"Alright, see you later."

"Wait … I mean, is that a promise?"

DING!

The door to the store opened into the gloomy late spring morning in the Southern California hills. The light and cool noon air was stiff and sullen in the grey obscurity that whispered rain. The vivid colors off the white and red Spanish architecture of the galleria seemed muted in the dreary weather. It didn't stop the kind of culture and shoppers that famously fluttered around the area of golden handled doors, and unique entrances to the high end shops that demanded a certain status of wealth to shop at them. Seemed like a strange place to begin.

The young man had been walking down the street, only to stop and bend down to untie and retie his shoe as a camera crew followed a familiar woman with a famous rear end down the street. He couldn't let himself be even in the background of a shot. One slip up, one disinterested glance in the background of a show by the right person and a lot of things could go wrong. He watched them leave before he stood up again.

A phone buzzed in his dark blue field jacket as he continued his search for a dark back alley and yellow tape. He sighed when he knew he didn't need to look at the ID to know who it was that was calling him. There was a guilt inside him that knew he had agreed to come here under false pretenses, and that his absence from what he said he would be doing made him a bit of an asshole. But he knew that what had happened yesterday and to find out the truth of it all was important, that this was his life, his real life. When he answers the phone, that won't be him, that would be someone else that he wished he could be.

"What?" He sighed.

"_Way to flatter a girl." _

"Riley …" He hinted of a misstep in decorum with an irritable huff.

"_Oh come on, John, you're like three shops away!" _

"…"

"_Ugh … stickler, God!" _

There was a combination of buttons that were pressed on the other lines key pad. John Connor knew that he was probably more like five shops away now, and if he were Riley he'd also be annoyed. But for some reason whenever he was away from home, and by himself he seemed cursed to be ever haunted by the disembodied voice of his mother that brainwashed him into inheriting personal ticks. The idea of turning into Sarah Connor didn't exactly make him feel any better when talking to his girlfriend on the phone.

"_Feel better?" _

He rolled his eyes. "Sure …" Today wasn't the day for this kind of grab ass of dialogue. John Connor was in the middle of the hunt, and somehow he still had to play boyfriend. Sure, he knew he was spoiled. A beautiful, perky blond, with amazing curves, and seemed to accept almost everything he does. But maybe that was why he couldn't sleep at night, made him question every phone call and smile. She never minded anything he did, provided that he tells her about it, about himself.

"_Well you shouldn't!" _

There was a tone in her voice that was slightly annoyed, only slightly. "Why's that?" He asked flatly, checking an alley. His eyes narrowed when he saw the crime scene tape, ripped in half. He paused his advance while he committed to the conversation before going in.

"_You promised to come help me pick out my dress." _

"I didn't promise you, I said I'd take you." He switched hands with the phone, checking his watch for the time.

"_It's the same thing." _

"Riley, come on, do I look like a guy who knows a thing about prom dresses?"

"_Didn't you ever go shopping with your mom or something?" _

"Riley, does my mom look like she knows a thing about prom dresses?" He asked rhetorically.

"_Ugh, Cameron then?" _

"Just pick one, and call me so I can help you pay for it." He rolled his eyes. He began tapping his foot.

"_Don't you want to see it?" _

She whined playfully. "I'm going too eventually, aren't I?" He said with a stiff patience.

"_But that's months away … who knows what can happen in a couple of months?" _

He tightened his teeth in mounting irritation. "Give me five minutes, Riley, please?" His calm was starting to crack. There was a long pause from the other line.

"_It's your lucky day, stickler, I'll give you seven." _

He didn't even say goodbye as he hung up. Riley had been strangely distracted at the end. It was what he needed to call the phone conversations that usually made him feel a sense of normality. But those tit-for-tat teenage conversations didn't make him feel at home. In a strange sense of opposite, the scrounging around a damp alley cocooned by roles of crime scene tape made him feel more himself than one night with the blond girl quipping at a television commercial on his sofa.

Like most things in this city, nothing was really original. Ideas used and reused, repackaged, renovated, and rebranded. That was the history of all of the buildings in Los Angeles, the finger prints of what had come before usually was all over an alley. Not three hours dry and the concrete already had a layer of grime on it. The white plaster and Spanish tile of the redone building seemed to have stopped at the front. In between the two stores was wall to wall red brick of the original design. The city had always been good at hiding its true face. They were in the richest, spotless, and most modern part of town, filled with glass and holographs from projectors in the windows of the high tech gadget stores. Yet, just one trip down its alleys and it made John feel more unsafe than ever. In the steam filled narrow there was a disconnected, forgotten, payphone with a vintage McDonalds sponsorship sticker slapped on the side. The rusted base was planted in the ground at a leaning angle. It was joined by a host of washed out and faded advertisements nailed and stapled into the muddy brick. Pink Floyd's "The Wall" at the LA Coliseum, some hair band from the early 80's called Tahee Cain. They all greeted John as he walked carefully. He noticed the tire tracks in the layers of grime from the cement truck.

He stopped at the man sized imprint of a body on the newly paved ground. He crouched in front of it and shook his head. Any decent person would've refilled the hole. But he guessed they weren't being paid enough to have empathy, and plus it looked like no one had even been in this place in twenty six years. Further down the alley was a powder blue garbage dumpster, a brave color for being in Trojan territory. It had all the old tags of street art that John recognized from his childhood. This seemed like as good as any place for a time displacement. Out of the way, forgotten, it beat appearing on a busy intersection naked as the day he was born with his mother huddled against him.

But beyond that fact, he had actually never heard of a time bubble opening above ground. It seemed strange and out of the ordinary. He wouldn't believe it at first, but the fact that there were no signs of scorch marking or burnt out debris to dispute the clerk's story. So he looked up and frowned in puzzlement. All he was looking for was in fact above him. Both retaining walls of the buildings had angled damage, as if the brick had been eroded away with a welding torch in a sphere design. He also noticed the usual scorch markings of the electrical interlude before the opening of the bubble all over the brick close to the roof.

If he could imagine what happened, he'd have to say that the displacement must have taken place above. From the tire tracks on the floor the time traveler must have landed on top of the cement mixer, dumping the pay load all over one of the workers as told from the imprint were they pulled him out. Once landed this old man, whoever he might be, must have broken the other worker's neck in his disorientation. Without seeing what happened or have access to the body, John assumed it must have been a machine by the method of death.

There was a fire in his gut over helpless anger, knowing that the only way to track this one is to keep a close eye on the paper and the web for more deaths. Curiously he moved forward through the alley, looking for any sort of clue that might save some poor unwitting soul's life. He sometimes, like Sarah, wondered how many people had to die. How many more sacrificed before it all ended, if it ever ended at all.

At the back of the alley behind a chain linked fence was a covered parking lot filled with expensive cars. Their make and model was obscured by a steaming manhole that billowed stacks of hot air to the surface. The closer John got, the more humid and uncomfortable the environment. The humidity and smell was like stepping back into the rainforests and jungles of his childhood. Closer to the end of the alleyway, near the manhole at least one of many mysterious smells could be identified. He placed his hands in his jacket pockets as he squatted in front of the item of his curiosity.

It was the corpse of a common alley cat. She was lying face down in a draining puddle, her head turned at an odd angle. John squinted in disgust at the sight of the feline's stomach opened up. Her ribs where shown in the open and a pile of intenseness were crowded around her broken paws. It looked as if some large, vicious animal had ripped out her insides, before breaking her neck and discarding the body.

Suddenly there was something dangerous in the air. He felt the wind change and now amongst the smell of heated water, was something raw and dusty. The closest he could describe it was the sent of left over ember and ash after a campfire had been doused. There was a prickle that went up the back of his neck and his breath became ragged, as his heart pumped faster. The anxiety of knowing that you were being watched by a predator filled his chest. Slowly and cautiously he used his gut to pinpoint the location.

Behind the stacks of steam and fence, amongst the high class cars in the lot something hunched in the shadows. John could make out the outline of wizened, ragged stubble of white on a strong jaw. But amongst the very little he could make out there was always the striking red eyes reflected in the dimmed light. They watched him from the dark of the garage with a look of repressed aggression and a stoic sense of puzzled curiosity. But even then there was no mistaking that they were eyes of a pure killer at the top of his food chain.

BUZZ! BUZZ!

John flinched at the vibration of his phone within his jacket. He swiftly removed it from his pocket with the intention of dropping whoever it was at the very moment. He did a double take from the familiar number back to the fence only to find that the predatory eyes had disappeared as had the large muscular shadow. Squinting hard, John tried to get his vision past the thick stacks of white steam to the darkness beyond. He strained till he hurt himself and his phone came alive again. With one hand he rubbed them in irritation as he answered the angry buzzing with a long agitated sigh.

This time there was what sounded like hard taps of passive aggression on the opposite line's number pad. Her beeps corresponded clumsily with the code. _"There … happy?"_ There was a sickly sweet whip to her bitter voice.

"Ecstatic." John replied dryly, blinking hard before giving a second look at the parking garage to see a group of oblivious young people piling into a yellow Hummer. Riley sounded a good deal more miffed at him in the five minutes that they had been separated by phone line. He knew something must have happened in the store. In this part of town there was more of a likely hood that a nasty exchange had taken place in his absence. Riley Dawson could be called many things, most positive, but in this part of town she stood out like a sore thumb.

"_Your five minutes are up, Cat Fancy." _

John stood to full height still watching the empty garage carefully. "You said seven." He challenged distractedly. There was a growl of a sneer that he could somehow see her making as they spoke.

"_What's the difference?" _

He rolled his eyes and decided to give up the ghost. "How about two minutes according to the laws of the universe." He answered with a huff of … he wasn't quite sure what to make of his encounter with whatever it was or how he should feel about it.

"_Oh yeah, and when has the laws of the universe ever applied to you, John?" _

He began to slowly trudge out of the alleyway back into the populated street. "Depends on which scientist you ask … If you don't believe in String Theory than they don't apply at all." He scoffed in the mouth of the narrow corridor. He watched overhead as the grey clouds, had grown a shade darker, and had become heavier since his time at the crime scene.

"_Whatever, Smart Ass, just come meet me at the store down the street from your cellphone place."_

The line crackled with static. He glared at the phone while he snapped it shut. Now he was more convinced than ever that something was going on at that dress shop. Being his mother's son, he'd give almost anything to not have to walk into whatever drama was brewing. There were more pressing matters to speak of. But with no leads or more clues in the real reason he had come to this place, he really couldn't find another excuse not to go. With a resign huff he made his way down the street.

Overhead, perched on top of a red tiled roof, a hunched figure sat stoically. It watched the young man passively navigate through bushels of women. They all looked the same, young and middle aged. Each wanting to be the other in their style of dress and attitude toward one another, a pursuit of happiness never found in a repeating revolving door of material want and age envy. They stuck to their groups, like traveling packs of wildebeest, carrying fancy shopping bags. In the first clap of ear popping thunder, it watched everyone go into a managed sprint in their high healed footwear as they scattered. Meanwhile, ever calm, John Connor folded up his collar hunching down for protection from the intruding droplets only moments away.

In a flash of a new Lightning bolt, dangerous red eyes glowed bright.

DING!

The first thing John noticed about "Bows before Hose" was that the stereo was turned up more than any self-respecting person might want too when playing the Pop Music they were. By the time John had jumped from 1999 he was still reeling from the crazed boy band epidemic and the rise of the Spice Girls. Coming into 2007 he found that the sound of the bane of his existence had somehow been perverted into some strange mixture of the same tired recycled lyrics and a mind numbing, repetitive club sound. In John's opinion it made everything seem trashier. But while he questioned the self-respect of the owner and manager, he couldn't question the angle they were playing too. It was after all prom season and the more teenage girls they attracted the better for profit.

The store was run of the mill for the real-estate they were on. Usually the stores in this part of town had some sort of gimmick that oozed uniqueness and expense. But the mediocrity might be more telling than any other detail John could surmise. It was a status-quo store. One good look around at the one and two piece dresses, the mermaid, and short skirts all on the metal racks, the wooden paneling and pearly white painted walls … you could go down La Brea and find the same stuff and prices. But if you were a teenage girl and told your friends that you bought your dress in the hills, it just might earn you points in the popularity rackets. Suddenly John was relieved that he didn't go to High School anymore to be surrounded by that culture.

From the moment he entered he drew stares. John was sure that he wasn't the first guy to come in here, but then he was by himself. But the girl behind the counter gave him a once over of interest. The older business woman in the back with the helmet hair and striped pant suit looked disappointed knowing he wasn't there to buy. There were a group of younger girls huddled, chattering in hushed whispers and giggles. He wasn't sure if it was because they thought he was good looking, or if they were mocking him for walking into a dress store on his own. But then he wasn't the only guy there surprisingly.

"Morris?" John strode past racks of endless sequence to a young Hispanic teen rocking back and forth on his skater shoes. The boy flinched at the call of his name, nearly tipping over a scantily clad chest piece. It would seem that the curiosity of solving a mystery involving the existence of the manikin's nipples had possessed the boy in "The Cure" vintage t-shirt. His guilty look of shame as he held a tipped over manikin in a salsa pose quickly was replaced with jovial surprise at the sight of his old friend.

"John?" He laughed as they met in front of a display of feather lined purple sequence dresses. They grasped hands in a firm greeting and gave a half hug with a shoulder touch and pat. "What are you doing here, man?" He asked tossing away John's hand in a playfully abrasive manner that only teenage boys could.

John sighed wearily. "Ah, Riley … Prom." He motioned his head to the back.

Morris nodded. "She asked you?" The spiky haired youth seemed impressed. In the pressure cooker of raging hormones, Riley Dawson was obviously well equipped to be the fantasy of many young men in the halls of Campo de Cahuenga High School.

The green eyed teen frowned. "I don't think we even discussed it." It suddenly dawned on John that he was helping Riley with her prom dress and yet he hadn't even considered going himself. What the hell was he even doing? It was these moments that made him question himself. All he ever did was argue with Sarah on how he wanted a normal life and yet his instincts when alone was to consider it all a baffling waste of time. Given prospective from other people, he sometimes wondered how good of a person he was truly becoming. Somewhere deep down he knew he was making the woman he loved more than anything's life so hard over a principle he himself found fruitless.

But his response to his guilty revelation was to give a scoffed laugh to his friends commiserating chuckle. There was an awkward silence as John looked around to find what exactly had brought Morris here as well, other than to perv on the life sized dolls. Then it dawned on him.

"You … found someone to go with you?" He smiled while giving him a congratulating shake of the shoulder. "Congrats man." He complimented with honest admiration. It had been really hard to see the kid with a girl. The last time they had chatted some females up, John had been the guy's wing man. Sadly Morris was trying too hard and when he squirted milk from his nose at his target's passing unfunny pun, they agreed to give it another six weeks before trying someone else.

There was something confused in the boy's eyes after John's congratulations. "What are you talking about, you knew that." He said with a chuckle, punching John in the shoulder lightly.

His brow furrowed. "Knew what?" he asked with the shake of his head.

Morris turned his head and looked around. "Come on, man." He laughed after a double take, as if John was trying to pull a fast one. "You were there." He punched John again.

"John!"

Squinting in confusion the young man followed the call of his name to the blond figure sweeping toward him. Riley dramatically appeared to break up the boys conversation and her dress seemed to do all the heavy lifting. She wore a two piece skin tight dress of black sequence. The top was a formless black handkerchief tied onto her bare pale back like a bikini. Her bare midriff was on full display down to her tight sequenced skirt that shimmered in the store lights. It left little to the imagination in the constriction and the high slit up to almost her curvy hips.

"Paint me like one of your French girl's, Squinchy!" She announced dramatically with upturned wrist attached to her forehead, leaning back against a wood enclosed rack of accessories. John stared at her for a long moment, though not as hard apparently as a shell shocked Morris who looked to be on the verge of going blind. His jaw hung open as John remained cool under her obvious attempt to get some sort of reaction out of him as per-usual.

He gave one glance at Morris who seemed to have been frozen into a human statue and sighed. "Is that the one you really want?" he asked, scratching behind his ear, ignoring Morris. Riley just frowned playfully.

"What do you think?" She asked.

"You're gorgeous …" Morris said finally. John frowned and turned to his friend, crossing his arms. "I mean … it's gorgeous … on you." He quickly fumbled over his words.

Riley smirked smugly, nodding her head victoriously. "And what do you think?" She asked, turning to John.

"It's perfect …"

John had immediately quirked his eyebrow toward Morris who had once again answered for him. Both teens watched the youth distractedly take a hold of one of the manikins under arm, staring at Riley. John cleared his throat into a fist and leaned forward.

"It's, uh …"

"Curvy …"

"Alright, why don't we just go somewhere to talk about it in private?" John motioned Riley toward the back end of the store. In passing he patted Morris on the shoulder with a shake of his head as they departed leaving the boy to watch blond teen go while still cradling the manikin.

The girl led the way toward the dressing rooms. It wasn't that John didn't admire what he knew Riley wanted him too. It just felt all so forced, like she was trying too hard. He couldn't help but feel like all of this had to do with whatever had gone on in his absence. She was any young man's dream, but all of this was starting to make him wonder what she was trying to prove and to whom.

There was a little plaza at the end of the rows of wooden racks and stiffly fibered carpets that made up the dressing room area. Decorated white tile lined the floors that had three separate waiting benches screwed into it. In between the four curtain drawn rooms was a triangular groove within the wall with twin mirrors on each side.

"So what do you think?" Riley gave the dress a twirl, when she returned he could tell that she was expecting a certain answer from him.

He gave her a long look. "Is this what you really want?" He asked poignantly with doubt ever present in his voice. The girl looked playful, if not grudging underneath at John Connor's usual inherited Sturm to her devil-may-care attitude.

"Can you imagine me showing up in this Slave Leia outfit, and your mom answering the door?" She laughed.

A cold shiver went visibly down his spine. "I'd rather not." He admitted.

She laughed at his glazed face of fear at even the thought of the scenario. "What do you think? too square for her?" She asked with a suggestive wink.

"She's worn worst." He shuttered again at the hammering of repressed memories beating on the gates of his frontal lobe.

"You're joking …"

"I wish I was." He sighed. "I'm going to ask you again, is this really the one you want?" he asked with a more stern voice. The tone he used to speak with her seemed to touch a cord. The lack of interest in what she was doing and plotting stung her into a defensive shift in personality. There was even a glimmer of annoyance. These were all little things that he was sure that the girl hadn't bothered to wonder if he noticed.

She looked around, before she spoke. "You can't say it, can you?" She asked in a huff.

John glared. "Say what?" He sighed.

"Do I have to spell it out for you?"

"What do you want me to say, Riley?"

"To say I look nice, that I'm beautiful, John. Is it that hard?" She was pressing him and it didn't feel like it had anything to do with the dress.

He nodded. "It might be … especially when I'm not the one you're doing this for." He replied hotly. John Connor was his parents' child. In both Reese and Connor families when pressed too hard they tended to lash out and John showed his heritage.

Stricken by his words, the blond backed down. "What do you mean?" She looked uncomfortable.

"What do you think you're trying to prove by doing this?!" Emerald orbs got darker.

There was a sudden blankness to crystal colored eyes. "I'm a teenage girl, John. We like to do stuff like this …" her voice seemed to take a different, unfeeling tone.

John grabbed Riley's hand and turned it up. She watched him check her palms. "I guess you memorized your lines, pretty good this time." She ripped her hand out of his grip. "That bull works on lighters, not prom dresses. If you got something to tell me you best say it now." He warned her.

Cornered, the girl reached out and slapped him in the face. All in the store turned to watch the exchange at the echo of violence. In the aftermath John didn't flinch, or cover the red hand mark on his face. There was something dangerous in his eyes though as he stood silently watching the very breath the girl drew.

"Forget it, forget you, forget all of it." Riley stormed away under his murderous glare to one of the rooms. She entered and quickly drew the curtain back behind her with an angry slide of rings on metal. When she was gone, the teen rubbed his jaw thoughtfully.

Turning he paced away from bench and tile, back to carpet. He leaned on the first wooden rack he could find and gave a calming breath, letting it all drain out. The endless wheels of his mind turned like complicated clockwork as he watched a surly store clerk tug in contest before finally ripping a manikin from Morris's grip.

He had gotten under Riley's skin in a bad way this time, so much so that she had resorted to violence. Though it seemed strange that her needing him to complement on her dress seemed extreme, he still came to the conclusion that it was something else. But that seemed to be the problem with Riley in general. Fun, bubbly, and boundless energy, Riley Dawson at the end of the day still had something else on her mind when she was with him. He was starting to piece it together, but his theory needed hard evidence before he let it blow his life apart. If what he thought every night as he went to bed was in fact true, it would mean that all the bridges he had burned and people he was hurting for just this ounce of normality would had been for nothing.

He wasn't sure he could handle that.

"John?"

The minute it he heard the stoic voice of angelic innocence that spoke his name with such reverence and affection that it destroyed him, John knew what was going on with Riley. Like every day since the moment she asked him his name in some classroom a thousand years ago, her very presence brought out an aggression of a tortured man.

"I should've known."

Playing wing man to Morris, watching TV with Riley, all of it was that which was expected of John. That is what everyone thought John wanted, normalcy. But it wasn't. What John Connor wanted was so far from the normal life he had once dreamed of. In the dark of the night he wanted just one thing, one impossible thing that pained his very soul. Every day was pushing a boulder up a hill to fix himself after his great aching heart filled with such longing had torn him apart like a flock of hungry crows. What John Connor wanted was the one thing he could never have, that traveled ever in his shadow as he led her through a never ending underworld, ensuring that he could never turn around to look at her.

When he turned to face the cyborg sworn to protect him, he wished he hadn't. A slender girl slowly appeared from behind a curtain. She wore a strapless evening gown made of a glimmering fabric the color of light peach with silvery sequins traveling down the sheer material like rivers of light. Her creamy tanned skin was scrubbed and moisturized till it shimmered in the light. While silky chocolate ringlets spilled glossily down her bare back. There was just the ghost of an ever present look of everlasting affection for the boy standing in front of her. Riley Dawson was dressed to seduce and distract, but Cameron was the opposite— a pillar of purity and virtue, the angel.

There was something almost hurt in her golden eyes when he averted his with the cover of his hand. Like a bright light, it seemed to pain him just to see her this way. "What are you doing here?!" he asked angrily.

"Shopping for a prom dress." She replied without missing a beat.

"Why?" He chanced a look and knew it was a moment too long. He was captured by her and there was no turning back now.

Golden eyes seemed so blank, and yet it seemed as if he was the only one who saw something inside. "I was asked, you told me to say yes." She explained with a tilt of her head. It hit him even before she could finish. It was the day they attacked Sarkissian's hideout, the dead thug in the trunk. He had been so desperate to get home he had barely given it a thought when Morris asked.

"Well who the hell, told you to come here?!" He shouted at her. A part of him was filled with a helpless jealousy, an angered fire over the blunder.

The cyborg girl watched him with a long gaze. Finally she bowed her head in a silent yield. "I'll leave." She agreed. It felt like someone was hammering his insides to watch her turn and reoccupy her changing room. Covering his eyes again, he never felt worse in his life in that moment.

There was a deep anger that he couldn't explain or control. It was just the way she looked at him, the devotion in her menial tasks concerning him, the way she hung off every word he ever said. It was hard feeling the way he did and knowing that it was all more than Riley had ever done for him. It was even worse trying to make a normal, ordinary, and sanctioned relationship work ever surrounded by perfection. The constant battles the two girls fought and for what? What future did he have with Cameron, and yet she still made it harder for him coming after Riley like this, prodding the blond girl. He was ever tortured knowing his love came to no end. Wondering if everything he longed for was a preprogrammed response of a killer and anything else was in his head that could get him killed. But she was beautiful and innocent, filled with a naivety of the world that made her so easy to fill your heart with. John Connor may be a legend someday, but till then he was only human. How could he not fall in love with her, how could anyone not?

He strode forward without thinking, without caring. He followed her to her dressing stall and opened Cameron's curtain. The girl had just slipped the zipper down her back when he entered. She looked up as he came inside with surprise.

"I'm sorry …" He apologized. Closing the curtain he stepped closer. "I'm sorry." He repeated again with a sigh. He reached out and touched her hair with an instinct of someone in deep regret. He stroked her hair once. Her eyes following his hand alerted him of what he was doing. He quickly retracted his hand and cleared his throat. He squinched his eyes shut and gave a deep breath. "I'm sorry." He said one last time. Wordlessly he turned to leave.

"John?"

The way she said his name it was like hitting a brick wall. He couldn't move and escape the way she said it.

"Yeah?" He didn't turn around.

"Can you zip me up?" She asked with a delicate courtesy.

He returned to her and her golden eyes and nodded without a word. Moving closer, she turned away from him. He could feel the warm skin of her bareback as he began pulling the zipper up. In the tight confines he was enticed by the girly shampoo she had always bought, somehow knowing how much he loved the smell of it. Still fresh from the morning shower it was like a narcotic so close to his nostrils.

He didn't know who he was and maybe he didn't even care when he buried his nose into her ringlets whiffing it gently. So close to one another it was like being under a spell, bodies being controlled by a universe of feelings. The small space was toxic with all that had not been said and never could be. Cameron turned her head watching him, as his hand reached up her bareback when he was done with her zipper. Cameron reached out a slender hand capturing his cheek with the red mark. There was such an intensity of hormones and repressed feelings that at the gentle touch of his skin, the care in her rubbing of the mark, a single tear fell from his green eyes. Her response was puzzled and yet her face lightened. In golden orbs it was as if no one else was in the world but John. There were no words needed when they gazed into each other's eyes. John was faltering inside, his heart bursting with longing, hurt, and so much love. He needed her, needed her in every way a sentient being needed another.

Slowly the gap began to close between them. Both occupants feeling not themselves and yet showing to one another what they had become in sight of each other every day without absolution. It was madness and a curiosity, a journey into a bottomless pit and not ever wanting to turn away.

"Cameron?"

Their momentum was halted by the voice of reason. Not a voice in their head or in their space. It was the voice of Morris standing outside the changing rooms wondering where his future date had gone too. John didn't take the final plunge into madness that morning. While their friend called for Cameron again she turned away from his lips. He gave long breath into her curls and closed his eyes. She let him rest his head against her curls and his hand on her shoulder. They collected themselves in a moment of calm before she allowed herself to move away from John. Before she exited, Cameron gave one last gaze of something sparking behind the great wall of stoicism, before departing back into the real world.

Everything hurt and nothing made sense in the emptiness of the tight dressing room. John Connor's heart raced and mind lost any amount of function. It was like walking into heaven and having the gates closed right in front of him. Paradise's ethereal warmth and light a step away, a beauty like he had never seen before just in his embrace and yet so far away.

It hurt so much he wanted to die.

Stepping out of the dressing stall like a man dazed, he watched with hardened eyes as Morris reacted in the only appropriate way. He was speechless and stuttered over the cyborg, it might have been the happiest he'd ever seen his friend. He'd never let a soul see how haunted he was over it, holding himself up only by a wooden handle on a rack. A buzz from his phone and the punching of a code accompanied the sight of a blond haired girl in a familiar leather jacket storm out into the rain.

"Yeah, mom?"

"_What's wrong, John?" _

The young man's hurt green eyes met his protector's across the store.

"Everything."


	2. The Science of Deduction

**The Science of Deduction **

_The Ashokan Farewell_

Like shavings from a block of the dirtiest of ice, a soft docile flurry of fat snowflakes fell from the swirling black clouds that hung heavy over the black bay below, giving all within its gaze the darkest of blue tints. The monster surge of the untamed ocean viciously crashed and overflowed without abandon on the submerged shores of old docks and piers, washing away the corroded and abandoned market places and little shops that had once been there. Neptune remained unchallenged and unchecked as his domain stretched through the shadowy buildings and infested alleyways of the old districts, claiming the heavy corroded beams and rafters of rusted and muscle infested suspension bridges that lumbered back out into the open sea to join the floating junkyard of debris.

The roar of the never ending surf echoed elementally throughout the dilapidated and grimy streets, ever threatening to make a new water level. But they were all empty boasts to an old building at the top of an ancient cliff face thumbing its nose at the terrifying vastness of the violent sea from its frosted and dusty stain glass windows that faced the bay. While the ocean's mighty wave's foamed and frothed like an agitated mad dog, selecting the frozen perspiration on the swirling frigid breeze.

The soft glow of a lamp tossed its dim light throughout an expansive room casting a cascade of shadows from the snowfall on the canvas of the Tudor walls of the main office. Joined amongst the odd phenomenon was a tall shadow that stood within the heart of the illusion. His active hands held a bow and violin as he played an old melancholy air to the lonesome tomes of his surroundings and state of mind on this very night.

The aged office absorbed the tragically sorrowful music with the zeal of an old grandfather that longed for the better days of youth, first love, and his young children. Within these halls, Legends that had stridden through history books like giants had once made this place their home. Amongst all their greater glories, victories, losses, and sorrows, shared in yellowed and fading framed newspaper articles and priceless trophies of adventures long past, it was the specter of a great love that had been left behind living on only in each tragic scrape and sorrowful lilt of a violin.

The man played for all that was missing, for all that should never have been, for all the joyful yesterdays that seemed only a fading dream in this lonesome forgotten place of a long dead age of heroism. Even as he played he did not do so with himself in mind, never himself. Those who have lost and survived to never let go often do small things. An empty plate for an empty chair at the family dinner table, a shot of alcohol placed in front of a picture of a friend long gone, and a toast by patrons in memoriam on the appointed day. But for the fiddle player, he played every song as if it were a duet. His notes and cues with the utmost superiority of a lifetime of practice, but when it came time for the accompaniment, he played background … even when there was no one there to join him ever again. Every time he picked up the instrument, those who could hear the echoing notes on a quiet night of the same lonesome street would always know something wasn't right with the beautiful melodies the silhouette played in the dark of the old building. The music never seemed complete, forever missing a part of a whole that could never be replaced.

As the song reached the finale he put all of his heart and soul in the way he made the old violin sound with the high pitch of an emotional wail before he gently came to the end of his song. He could almost hear the other player with him as they finished. When it was over, he paused hopefully as so many times before when he opened his eyes to look around the empty office of the only home he had ever known. With an old familiar pain he looked to the dusty table under the saucer lamplight almost anticipating the look of annoyance on hard green eyes as they were going over maps, but no one was there. He turned to the well-worn leather sofa in the nook of the office surrounded by framed newspaper articles. He waited for the sleepy glossy black haired beauty to turn on him in loving annoyance and announce a scolding of "There are three thousand miles of nothing out there and yet you decide you need to do that here?" But the couch was empty, with only a threadbare throw blanket hung off the back where her scent still lingered. He finally turned to the lounge chair made of matching leather near the other nook where large filing cabinets stood. It hit him the hardest most of all to see her abandoned harp leaning against the wall next to the empty chair. It was a reminder that no matter how long he waited, there would be no congratulatory smirk from a dark haired beauty of a duet well done.

Slowly he lowered his instrument and bow to his sides and was greeted only by a tragic silence that fell over the empty building still vibrating with his music. It shouldn't hurt so much after all the years, but the muscle instinct of memories and habits remained unbroken. The build-up only caused more pain to the climax, and the remorse of the closing when he always found himself alone.

He gave a grim smirk of melancholy and bowed his head as he let himself remember and relive each pain till he returned to speed. When he had, he gently walked to the lounge chair and dropped his violin and bow on the cushion. Bent over the chair, he spotted the dusty harp, whose golden paint was starting to fade and green in age and disuse. A prize once scavenged from an abandoned concert hall in Boston that had been collecting two decade's worth of soot. Now it seemed it's morose life had yet come full circle as it once more collected dust in the loss of its owner. He reached for the instrument in a moment of nostalgia, but stopped … as he always did. His hand lingered just at the fingertips of the untuned strings. For a moment he was standing at the edge of an aircraft carrier deck again. The single unbroken search light reflected in her silken bridal corset. And as he cradled her bloody body in his arms, her blank eyes looking back at him, but not in annoyance, not in love, not like anything … not ever again. He left her harp untouched and found no comfort of a floating fortress of nightmares being at the bottom of it's watery grave, forever to haunt him.

They say you learn to live with it, that it doesn't hurt so badly after a while. But when you have to pick and choose which hurt to ignore and which to live with, every day, it never gets old, and it never ends. You keep your head down, pick your battles and you only immerge victorious when you awake the next morning alive without having eaten your own gun.

The shadow sat in a broad leather office chair meant for a man much bigger than him. The old rolling chair creaked as he slouched broodingly. In front of him sat a heavy oak desk, discolored after decades of use. On its right was a computer station with three blank plasma screens and key board gathering dust. In front of him on the main work area was a picture frame. The photo was of a teenage girl in a form fitting black dress. She was standing in front of a familiar bathroom mirror as if getting ready for a dinner party. She smiled a perfect white smile, but even then there was a strange blankness in her golden eyes. The ballerina, while exuding a purity of innocence that appealed to the better nature of one's humanity, there was still something cold and deadly in her stalwart figure that was visible to the clairvoyant eye.

For a long moment he stared at her picture as he had been known to do from time to time. But tonight, for the first time in many years, she was the focus of his thoughts, of his motivations, anger, and ruthlessness of the evening. After all the lingering questions of the case that stood before him, how could he not think of her? On top of the desk sat a worn leather photo album that was opened to a specific page held in place with a copper wedding ring, taken from a dead man's palm.

There was a designed collection of digital photographs taken at a wedding many years ago. Two or three pictures around the collage were of people that seemed almost forgotten in his mind. A round table of men in tuxedo shirts and rolled up sleeves. James Ellison sitting with Martin Bedell in his West Point dress uniform, Lauren Fields in an elegant purple bride's maid gown sitting on her husband's lap as they all toasted the photographer. He could never imagine them so young and carefree. It was like a window to another world, a better world. There was an eerie photo of a pretty little flower girl with fiery red hair and blue dress. She smiled big for the camera as she hugged to a woman with deathly pale skin and a grey skin tight gown. She looked like a shark on the prowl without a hint of remorse after she ripped out your inners.

But once again faced with the center picture that had prompted him to take up the violin the first time, he simply reached out and touched it as if wanting to touch them, touch her. It was a photo of two people alone on the dance floor. A teenage ballerina, the same as in the black dress, but this time she wore a silky strapless wedding dress. The bride's hair was a curtain of gloss chocolate running down the bare back of her wedding gown. She looked transported, completely divorced from the real world in the arms of a handsomely rugged youth in a traditional tuxedo. She was captured in his emerald eyes as if nothing in the world mattered but the two of them. As if they were each other's life and only purpose. This moment had been their happy ever after, the pinnacle of all that they had longed for after all the years of doubt. They had reached the edge of the world that day and found that there was nothing left to conquer, and wept from joy. It was a once in a lifetime, once in a century love, never to be seen again, forever to be whispered about, rumored of around campfires.

The man took the ring in hand thoughtfully looking over the pictures of a frozen memory in time of happiness long passed. Yet it provided little help in relevance to the case other than bring the man a momentary comfort, before a deep sadness and pain took him. All he could do now was solve the case in honor of this love.

He placed the ring under the glass lamp shade and observed it carefully. It was coded from the inside with a brown crust, but it was hard to make out. So he opened a drawer in the desk and withdrew from the top a chrome handled magnifying glass. He cleaned the Zeiss lens with his navy blue t-shirt before using it to get a closer look at the thick brown ring. It couldn't be dirt when it was that packed in, nor was it mud that close to the desert. But there was a possibility …

Reaching over he clicked the lamp light off, bathing the detective offices in a blue hued darkness as he fished around in the old desk. He extracted from the utility drawer a penlight that he clicked on and off several times watching it emit a blue light. He placed the ring back on the desk, using the magnifying glass to watch in one hand, while he shined the blue penlight on the ring. His enhanced vision was alight with an off white neon glow that bathed the inside of the ring. It was as he expected, the rust was dried blood.

He took the ring in hand and swiveled the chair to face the window thoughtfully, sitting in the blue hued darkness around him. After a beat he pushed out the chair and paced out of the office. He gripped the handle of an old wooden door with a frosted glass pain that was labeled by the names of two consulting detectivesin black paint. He twisted the knob which rattled with an audible click and squealed as he opened it into the building's lobby.

It was a large space of ivory marble tile that was beginning to crack in age. It had no windows but for the impossibly thick bullet proof glass at the bolted front doors to the building. Next to the office was a spiraling metal staircase that led to a loft above where a family had struggled to stay together. Though still occupied it would never be the same now that there was only one of them left.

The extended foyer was filled with an assortment of glass cases that one might find in a museum. They ranged from tall rectangular glass filled with clothing, to cubed exhibits on wooden stands lined with red velvet on the bottom. Trophies and souvenirs from a lost violent era of a city's past that many had once called a "More civilized time" in human history. A maroon desert robe and full faced turban of Bedouin clothing. In well-spaced grids cubed exhibits decorated the lobby. In one sat a plasma rifle and a ice stained fedora hat. While the man walked by them, his steps were accompanied by the thud of crystal flood lights switching on in motion detection underneath the trophy cases.

The shadowy figure paused at a large ashy desk that still had an assistant's name plate upon it. Though faded from many years the word "_Fields_" could still be made out. Behind the desk was a rickety and dust covered toddler's playpen. Pinned to the aged wood was a stiff weather worn piece of office paper, with the words "Daycare" written in time faded ink. Mounted on the desk was a cluttered chemistry set with a Bunsen burner set on the left of a looping and swirling clear plastic distilling tube that hung suspended above. Behind, and in front of the set, were an assortment of forensic tools such as a high powered microscope that was joined by a seemingly unorganized collection of empty beakers and colorful vials in wooden racks.

Without missing a beat the man moved behind the desk and opened a door below. To the sound of jangling and clinking he began by pulling out an elongated glass jar scorched at the bottom that held a deep blue liquid. Next, a mason jar of red, and finally a wine bottle of green. Gently, he began depositing each chemical with a clank on the desk, while muttering to himself as he searched. Finally when he was done gathering materials, he reached into the playpen and retrieved an empty beaker and placed it with the rest of the formulas.

He began the set up for the scientific test by taking the pear shaped bottle of blue and placed it on the Bunsen burner pad. Pulling down the distillery tube, He began screwing the hose into the elongated top of the glass jar. Before moving on, the shadowy figure turned on the heat to the burner, letting the blue liquid begin to bubble and froth. After, he reached into his pocket and dropped the wedding ring into the empty beaker and began unscrewing the top of the Mason jar. The ring began to slowly float to the top as he poured the red liquid into the beaker carefully. When it was filled halfway he stopped and screwed the lid back on. He began holding his breath as he uncorked the wine bottle. "Careful." He hissed like a deflating balloon as he squinched an eye shut. He adjusted the wine bottle as if behind a sniper rifle. Slowly tipping, he cautiously moved the neck till it was positioned in the right angle. Green formula drizzled gently, landing in the center of the ring. Almost immediately the man pulled back on the bottle and quickly corked it again. He only let the rest of his breath out after it was safely inside the desk.

When he returned the green and red chemicals were mixing together. The crusted stains inside the ring were now falling away, mulching into an inky dark cloud that consumed the entire container. With easier breaths, the detective picked up the plastic glass and swirled the contents against the light of the nearest trophy case. Satisfied with the mixture of blood to chemical, he moved his microscope and placed the beaker under the hanging nozzle of the distillery hose. On the other side of the chemistry set the sky blue foam of the heated chemical obscured the vision of any liquid within the pear shaped bottle on the burner.

Slipping on a welder's glove, the tall man began to gently open the tube ways with the twist of a screw on the hose. The lobby of the building echoed with an obnoxious sucking sound as a squirt of superheated liquid that glowed in the dark was shot through the roller coaster ride of clear tubing. He closed the channel quickly and shut off the burner, while watching the glowing blue chemical glide gracefully through the line, almost entrancing and hypnotizing in its drawn out journey to its destination. When the liquid finally squeezed out of the nozzle in a fat, lighted droplet, it hit the dark cloudy liquid with a drip. There was a sudden sizzle like meat on the grill as vapors erupted from the now glowing beaker. The lobby whiffed of a strong iron smell as the reaction ran its course. When the light faded the elixir was now a distracting shade of violet. Making sure to take the chemistry tool within the hand of the welder's glove, the man observed the contents grimly as a film of frost began covering the beaker.

"What does violet mean?"

The shadow of a tall imposing figure appeared from behind a case filled with an old _**Jihadi's**_ black desert robe and full faced turban from long ago across the marble. The large, muscular figure was white haired and wrinkled. He wore a shined skin tight shirt of the darkest grey and black jeans. It was a sentry figure from a time long past that still haunted the old halls, barely speaking a word as it patrolled the old building and bunker as directed many years ago. Even when artificial flesh was aged, hair greying, and original master long dead, the rudimentary infiltrator still carried on, collecting dust like all the other trophies and memories in the old lair. The detective didn't blink at the aging T-800's appearance, he did not even turn to acknowledge the old _**guardian's**_ presence as he placed the beaker back on the desk.

"What color is Human blood, when exposed to oxygen?" He asked while picking up a pair of tweezers.

"Red."

The man nodded as he fished out the wedding ring floating at the top of the icy liquid. "Why is this, violet?" He asked absently while holding the ring up to find the copper band shining as if it had been washed clean of age.

The T-800 walked forward. "Because the blood you were testing wasn't human." It answered stonily with a thick Austrian accent. There was nothing in the voice of the tall figure. It's appearance, it's voice, and the crow's feet on his lower lip brought on the greatest sense of bleakness to the greyed surroundings than any ruin outside could.

"Because the blood I'm testing isn't human." The Detective confirmed distractedly. With a tiny bottle of salient solution he began cleaning the chemical residue off the ring. "Cyborg blood, your blood, it isn't really blood. It's a compound made up of nanites that act as cells to deluded O negative, and a host of synthetic oxygen carriers that don't need to be pumped through a Cardio Vascular system. When deoxygenized and exposed to a high concentration of chemicals the "blood" turns violet, instead of dark red, because of the synthetics." He explained ripping off the glove from his hand and tossing it on the desk.

"Why was it relevant to test the blood?"

The silhouette picked out the wedding ring and looked grim as he stared at it in the reflection of lights. "Because it proved that _she_ was there, when they killed him." He replied clutching the ring in a tight fist like the way he had found it in the murdered farmer's hand. "There was no trace of _her_, but the ring was in his hand." the detective paced away from the desk and his companion to one of the cubed exhibits. He stopped in front of a display of a sleek, but very bulky and large gun. The first plasma rifle shared the case with a frost damaged blue fedora, with a nine millimeter round through the top at the stock and on the other end a pair of bunny ears belonging to a sexy waitress uniform from long ago. Leaning back against it he crossed his arms and closed his eyes. In his vision he could see how it all went down as if it were a movie, a horrible atrocity that had already happened.

"I don't understand." The T-800 replied stiffly.

"It's simple, _Pops_, I was wrong …"

"About what, sir?"

"This was done by thieves."

* * *

**Acknowledgments**

_Title of chapter and song played by "the detective" is "Ashokan __Farewell" by Jay Ungar &amp; Molly Mason from the documentary "The Civil War" by Ken Burns _


	3. The Kingdom by the Sea

_It was many and many a year ago,_

_In a kingdom by the sea,_

_That a maiden there lived whom you may know_

_By the name of Annabel Lee;_

_And this maiden she lived with no other thought_

_Than to love and be loved by me._

"_**Annabel Lee" – Edgar Alan Poe**_

* * *

_Many Years Ago_

There is seldom a place in life in which you, like others before and after will come to in existence. Over the decades come many lives that have different and unique paths, so many cross sections of life with so many uncharted courses that intersect and diverge from each other. But all in time whether tomorrow, an hour from now, or many years later we all seem to end up in one place, all alone. It's a location that has various looks and feels, temperament and upkeep. The only thing that stays the same is the frigid temperature. There are three certainties in life, death, taxes, and a temporary space in the drawer of a cold, sterile morgue. In the end we all end up on a metal slab waiting to be examined or to be taken to a grave to house our soulless bodies.

From here an education can be learned or forced upon you. In this place every moment of human suffering and inequality are open to you, like a perverse art gallery. Every way to die, every savage murder, and helpless suicide can be found behind every door. One might say that it was a truer honesty, an unshrouded sketch of humanity that might be found within these dingy beige walls of tile and tarnished metal. Each marking on the body, each frozen face, all of it is a lesson, an understanding of what life means, what should be done with the time given to you. Over time some might lose the lessons, become too used to this setting and stop viewing each body as what they were. It made life easier that way. But for someone who had seen death, but had not become used to it, there was an uncomfortable wisdom.

As the shift ended the last out the door shut off the lights in the cold room. There was unceremonious stigma attached to dark humor and quips. "The dead will wait." And there were other mechanisms to cope the mind of the Examiners and Coroners that worked this place day to day. For the first several minutes there was stillness in the dark room. Waiting, holding in silence till the window in which someone might have forgotten something had closed. Then quietly a squeaking echoed off metal from inside the room itself. Nothing moved or shuttered in the still room and yet the noise persisted till a rattle, and then a new set of squeaks began.

Suddenly there was a clatter on the tiled linoleum floor. From a level air vent the cover was slowly peeled away and a figure appeared as he crawled out from inside the small crouched space. With an irritable sneeze, he cleared his throat and snorted, whipping off at least ninety years of cobwebs from the inside of the old brick coroner's office from the Hills Division of LA County. He'd think being in the part of town they were in that they would be able to afford someone to clean out their air ducts. The figure shuttered and gave a cough shaking his field coat of the frost that had crusted on his covered shoulders. They had been pumping cold air into the vents of the basement to keep the decay off the bodies. He probably should've known that, or at least figured they'd take those precautions before he had decided to use the ventilation system as his choice of infiltration.

It had claimed another one.

John Connor's alley traveler had killed again. For the last couple of days he had been hoping that this machine had been one of theirs, but it was a fool's hope.

Melinda Young, Eighteen, a cocktail waitress at some snooty bar up the hill. From what he knew from the write up in the paper, she had taken the trash out to the dumpster during party hour when she was accosted by a homeless man. She didn't have a chance. They said her neck was broken. That was all he needed to know. Derek had advised him to wait till the fourth kill to find an established pattern to hunt with. Maybe he was right, but John couldn't bring himself to wait. If he was lucky he might be able to find some sort of unique mark, or occurrence that could help him in finding the machine's pattern now.

His silhouetted figure from the florescent light of the hallway through the glass pane door drew a large shadow on the far wall of rolling cubbies. To the wall on the left was filled with small spaces were numbered holes with "Doe, John" and "Doe, Jane" on the little cards sat undisturbed. To his right, separated by a metal trench, were the spaces on the wall of death with names on the cards. He noticed as he figured there might be, that there were less John and Jane Does than named corpses. Though there were very few bodies as it was, you didn't see too many homicides in this part of town, or if you did they didn't stay here long. Private funeral homes, 24 hour autopsy, all for the right price. Those who were left in these rectangular spaces were those who had been murdered, who died without a semblance of money or influence. They were the day to day worker surrounded by the wealth and power that they had no stake in. Melinda was easy enough to find, because someone had already worked up a chart for her and had hung it from a pin. Before he opened the cubby, he unhooked the chart and leafed through it quietly.

Melinda Young was eighteen, as the paper reported. The girl was slender, paper light from her weight. The scar tissue from her foot only made sense that she was a dancer. She had anxiety problems from her Tox Screen where they found traces of prescription medicine from a therapist. He took a moment to wonder what it was that she was afraid of, did it matter to the case, or was she just a normal girl with normal fears?

Normal … He knew the word, not the feeling. This girl was a dancer who hurt her foot and most likely was anxious about what to do with the rest of her life. That was normal. Normal was not pacing the floor boards of your room, worrying about the world and the billions of people that would burn in nuclear holocaust. Normal wasn't lying in bed till the blurry eyes of the dawn slowly opened while you stare at the conjoining door between bedrooms, wondering and dreaming. Imagining a life, a quiet minute, just a hearts beat of a moment when it would be right to say what you felt, to do something about it. Knowing that only a simply thin wooden barrier separated you from all you wanted, all you dreamed, all that separated you from her. He shook his head with a clear of his throat, his breath fogging in front of him.

The preliminary report was done. It stated that she had died of a broken neck, though oddly it could've been a whole host of things that would've killed her. It seemed that she had been dealt serious brain damage from a concussive blow to the head. Then dazed, she was strangled by her attacker, the hands had to be so strong that it immediately crushed her windpipe. The girl, now brain damaged and suffocating, was then throttled so hard that her neck was broken.

John closed her chart and sighed long and thoughtfully. Closing his eyes he pictured the actions in his mind, the choreographed motions of the kill. He could see the blow, the crushing of the windpipe, and the throttle. One word entered his mind after it ended in his head, savagery. This attack on the defenseless girl was brutal and savage with the darkest hatred in nature. The assassin swung to kill, made sure she was dead in every way possible. It didn't seem like a killing machine did this, all it would've taken was a simple snap of the neck. This was brutally thorough, though with a lack finesse or enlightenment. For long a moment he wondered if he was dealing with a Cyborg at all, or had he come across something else. Someone who traveled the streams of time to settle a grudge, a human killer escaped into their timeline.

There was only one way to find out.

What he saw at the end of the clicking roll of the drawer being drawn out would change him. Fore in the shadows of that dark room he had, for just lingering seconds of doubt, touched a true darkness within. Emerald eyes became wide. His pupils shrank as they glassed over. It was as if time had stopped, as if the life within the teenager had ceased to exist as well. Behind shocked eyes a fire was snuffed and a deep blackness only felt in waking nightmares awoke into existence to forever plague him till the end of his days.

Lying on the slab was a naked young girl with long glossy chocolate hair that seemed black against her deathly pale skin. Both her eyes were open, though only one golden pupil was visible; the other was rolled back from visible neurological damage from blunt force trauma. Her pale, colorless frame was slender and perfect, a ballerina's body. A hand pressed against her cold bare belly as a teen shakily fell to his knees at her side. His breath was ragged as it came out heavily, his eyes covered with his resting forearm as he quietly lost control for a second. From his throat strangled guttural growls emitted from the boy. When he looked up she was still there, her hand in his as he laid his face against it.

He could swear it was her, it was Cameron. The same body type, the same face. A pain, a sharp ache was working through him, like being in front of a shotgun blast. All the longing and need had turned to poison in his veins that slowly killed him. With so much of himself invested in her, in this unchangeable love within him, to see it snuffed out like an evening candle it was as if for the briefest of horrible beats he had lost the better part of himself. It was the fear that snuck up on him, a fear that he didn't think about. What if she went before him? Now it was evident how much of an effect that would have …

It would kill him.

The only thing that saved John Connor's life that night was the appearance of an open wound on top of the girl's head. In the sight of the scarlet there was a lack of metal behind it. A tidal wave of reason washed over his brain. Slowly, memories of small things such as the girl's chart, and Tox screen filled him. It was like an ice pack on a burn, a drink of cold water in the desert. An overwhelming relief became him and yet the terror remained.

Several deep breaths later he was on his feet again. He used the slab to hold himself up as he darted away from the body, leaning down on a frozen metal island filled with dissection instruments. With his back to the body, he placed his hand over his eyes and breathed heavily. He wrestled with emotions, trying to bottle them up inside again. The fear and anguish in his moment of misunderstanding was palpable as it was deadly. A hand clutched his heart as he bent over and wheezed out the last of thunderous angst within his mind and body. When it was over a sharp ache of the worst kind was left behind to vex his muscles and chest for the next few days. He wasn't sure he ever knew anyone who had ever felt this way, or if it was ever possible to feel this way about another being. It scared him and yet it seemed like such a natural reaction that in his heart and soul it didn't seem out of place at the least.

There was a hurricane in John's chest when he turned back to the girl. Her eye looked up blankly to the ceiling, her face bereft of emotion. She was more like the cyborg in death than ever before. He closed his eyes for a beat and tried to control himself. Then, quietly he began back to the body.

It was time to begin.

He was waiting for her to say something, to give permission, to reassure him, like _she_ would. But he knew Melinda wasn't her, she wasn't Cameron. His hands shook was he took her face in hand, he let out a shallow breath, gently turning her head to see the wound.

"_It's okay, John. We've done this before." _

Tears welled in his eyes, even when he told himself she was at home, waiting for him. The blow to the head was vicious. It cracked her skull, like she had been hit by a pipe or brick. But the impact point was shaped like a fist. This meant that Melinda Young's murderer was unnaturally strong to nearly kill someone with just one punch. It also came from behind her, which meant she had tried to run, or someone might have snuck up on her. It wasn't unheard of for a machine to simply waste a victim with one blow, but then why the other injuries?

He gently returned her head back to the upright position. Again and again her head tipped one way than the other. He frowned as he tried to put it back to center in just the right place. Even when she was placed back where she should be, he continued to adjust her at different angles, trying to find the optimal possession of comfort. His hand began unknowingly smoothing her hair, as he worked. When he was done he only noticed that his hand was gently stroking her cheek, a single tear sliding down the bridge of his nose and dripped down onto her cheekbone. Clearing his throat, John turned away again and whipped his eyes with his dusty sleeve.

"_I saw everything." _

One, two, three deep breaths frothed in front of him. Keeping his emotions down was like sitting on a lid of a box filled with wild dogs. He ran a hand through his thick hair and closed his eyes, working hard to keep composure. He kept repeating to himself that Melinda Young was not Cameron. That once he returned home, she would be there. He picked up a magnifying glass off a counter and returned to the body.

He placed it next to her shoulder and tilted Melinda's head upward. He placed his hands on the base of her neck, while his thumbs tenderly felt up the center of her throat. Most humans had a hard lining in their throats were their airway and tendons could be found. There was nothing but soft, supple skin where her windpipe should've been. The Coroner was wrong, the killer hadn't just caved in her windpipe he had severed it completely. The same with her neck, he hadn't just broken it, he had severed it from her spinal column. It was almost animal in the basest level of ferocity in which this beauty had been attacked.

He picked up the magnifying glass, wiping away the frosty film on the lens with his shirt. Leaning over the body, John used it to examine the yellowing bruises on the girl's platysma. There were marks embedded deeply into her skin, where her attacker had grabbed her. With an enhanced view of the wounds he immediately noticed the abnormally large and thick fingers that had left their impressions when they manhandled the former Ballerina. Whoever had attacked the girl must have been huge, gigantic in size and strength as well as big fingers that jammed deeply into the captured beauty's neck as they shook her violently. Together, all these points led away from a machine. This murder in particular seemed too savage, too … personal to be a machine.

"_We're not built to be cruel." _

There was likelihood, pulled from an impossibility that he might be dealing with something out of the normal Skynet fair. That out there somewhere was something new, something possibly more dangerous than the predictability of a T-888 infiltrator. The clue to the pattern he had been hoping to find, to use as a marker to begin hunting with might end up being the corpse herself.

Though he might have a lead, it wasn't without a price. Much like radiation poisoning or mustard gas, being around the body, around the dead girl with the likeness to everything he cared and longed for had taken its toll on John. No matter how hard he fought to keep himself straight, his mind on the task, her blank stare, the frozen tear upon her cheek drove him deeper and deeper into a darker place in his mind.

Tears streamed down his face though he fought to show no sign of his emotions. He was face to face with his greatest fear, his ultimate weakness. Within these walls he was confronted with the most damaging of illusions that tore his soul and hollowed him out. It might have liquidated everything inside him, but he continued to stare a moment longer.

Then, a hand reached out and cupped Melinda's cheek. It didn't seem right to leave her like this, alone in some cold place filled with the dregs of society and the unknown strangers. She deserved better, a place on top of a hill with the sun on her and flowers in the spring. But after all maybe it wasn't the girl he was thinking of at the moment. So gently he leaned down and kissed her forehead, before closing the seal. As he walked away he stumbled, needing the wall to support himself before he walked out the door.

In the distance the sound of someone kicking a trashcan and ripping paper off a bulletin board could be heard. It was all followed by a frightening roar of anguish.

* * *

There was a certain darkness in the nights like this that carried a most potent poison to the human soul. It was not detected by the weathermen. Some were immune; carrying on till it took ahold of them on some other night such as this. Sometimes it was visible to those who knew it, to those who suffered from the abuses of its effects: the soldier, the battered child. It was the way the shadows gathered heavily around the outside lantern light, the taste of the evening wind. It was in the gut, and in the heart, something that grew and changed, plaguing the soul and mind with whatever problem and anxiety taxed them. It built a pressure of questions and fears, making the answers and relief of them seem so far away. Hours spent in the dark planting seeds of doubt in the core of dreams.

No one could stay away for long, but very few spent long in its hold. The effects of such a night were mostly cleansed by rest and dreams, chased away in the rays of the first morning light of the new day. But to those few, like a weakened man catching a chill, it held on to you. Like a cold turning to disease or virus; it could stow away in your chest. Eventually it would kill you from the inside till there was nothing left but the darkness. Easily shaken, but to those who touched it or spent too long in its presence.

Inside the comfortable two story house on top of a sentry hill overlooking the great cityscape below, there were no shadows like this. For once there was something in the light, a hope, bright and shining. For a night, for maybe even a week, a looming deadline was forgotten in the meaningless banter; the god sent distraction of idle public gossip. Inside was a gathering that wasn't meant to be a celebration of any kind as it was meant to keep those nearest off the scent of what really happened behind the doors of the home. It was a planned façade, a week in the making to appear that everything was normal, when it was far from it. In each room were lives plagued by a great war many years from now and the endless struggle to stop it. Yet they had no knowledge that even as they sat to eat grilled meat and chatter about what was on TMZ and the news, all of time and space was burning in a great and terrible war between man and machine.

But tonight, sitting by himself, Derek Reese, uninterested in what was going on in the kitchen or on the back patio, was the first to see it. The evening shadows creeping closer to the light, pooling thickly like the coloring of a sharpie. The chattering continued, but in the living room there was a turn in the atmosphere and he knew immediately that something was wrong … that a storm was no longer brewing, that it was here.

John Connor opened the front door after unlocking three bolts. Even before he reached the door he had noticed all the lights in Casey's house were out and the smell of cooked meat coming from the back of his home. For an hour he sat in the cab of the truck, his eyes dazed and his mind frozen. When he closed his eyes he could still see her lying on the slab, and when he opened them he couldn't find a reason to get out of the truck. For the last twenty minutes he thought seriously of taking off and not coming back till all of what had just happened was left behind forever.

He was haunted by the feelings of that first sight. It was as if someone had stricken his mind. An hour and a half later and John still felt as if he was curled in a ball on the floor. He wasn't even sure how he got home. The thought, the inkling, the moment in which he had been convinced that he had lost her; that Cameron had been taken away, crippled him. Even now when it was proven that it had not been her, John still carried it too close. It was like a burn, a scar, a wound that would not heal properly. There was no relief, no wiping of the brow and a low whistle. He was slowly, dangerously, making his home in that place, rooming with the darkness that had invaded his heart, like an infection in an open wound.

He shuffled through the door of the home, closing and locking it behind him. Quietly he set the alarm code, after the chirp let everyone know that he was home. There were voices in the kitchen, and in the dining room. A flicker of anger lit eyes, like the smallest of a flint spark that led to a bonfire. After all he had gone through, the last thing he wanted to do was talk to anyone. He had no time to be bothered with normality when there was so much to do, to think on … to get over. It all seemed like a waste, like a bother to even try to act like there weren't horrible things out there and that some tri-tip grilled burger was going to help.

At the top of the stairs a silhouette stood watching him. He felt it before he saw it. It was the feeling like a prickle on the back of his neck and the rise of his heartbeat. He paused at the door and looked up morosely. The figure was slender and elegant, wearing a loose white dress of some sort. He didn't speak, and neither did she. They just stared at one another, and for once he allowed himself to let go in her presence. His eyes glassed over and he visibly shrank under her stoic study. She tilted her head at the look he gave her. Her shadowed eyes lightened as she slowly descended the steps in immediate reaction. Her white dress floated around her upper thighs as they became visible in the light.

"John …"

Derek was the first to discover that his nephew had returned home, after being away since midmorning. His concerned voice caught John's attention as he mounted a step on his way to meet the cyborg he had returned for. Derek was cradling a beer against his blue and grey long sleeve baseball jersey. He approached cautiously, while John never noticed how eerie he had become, shadowed underneath the vaulted stair light on the wall. When he met the teenager at the first landing he looked up. Together, John and Derek watched the lithe figure fall back to the top of the steps and disappear into the dark of the out of bound area to the guests of the home.

John's chest ached, as his heart sank into his ribs. He gritted his teeth and rubbed his forehead, bowing his head. He needed reassurance, needed a reverse of what had happened only an hour before. He needed just a touch, a sight, something physical to know that he hadn't lost her, that it will never happen. But as she disappeared like a puff of smoke, it filled him with frustration. But he bottled it all inside.

Being under Derek Reese's gaze felt like being spotted by a pair of million candle light power searchlights. You withered, wanted to get away from the brightness, away from the stark naked feeling of it going through you. But John didn't flinch. Yet, in his pride to not ever be backed down or be intimidated by his uncle he opened himself to his natural intuition.

Derek frowned. "What happened with the girl?" He asked quietly. The murders and investigation was, at the moment, their secret. It had been something that had supposed bring them closer by working together. But the man saw the exact opposite of what he had wanted in John's eyes. There was something reflected back at the time traveling soldier in the emerald that for once made _him_ flinch in their staring contests.

The strange reaction made the boy self-conscious. He shook his head. "It's …" He sighed and looked back up the stairs once more as if it was his answer to all his problems. Derek followed his gaze a moment than return to John more worried than before. "It was nothing, Derek." He bowed his head again, rubbing the back of his head.

"Yeah, nothing …" He mocked sarcastically. "You look like nothing happened." He pushed.

John met his gaze again in challenge. "I didn't say nothing happened … I just need to think on it, alright." He was becoming agitated.

"Probably should do the opposite." He took a swig of his beer.

John rolled his eyes and snatched the bottle from his uncle. "Don't worry about it, alright … I got it covered." He knocked it back with a hearty swig.

Derek watched him take the long draft with unreadable hazel eyes. "It's not 'it' that I'm worried about." He said with a nod.

It looked as if the boy was ready to strangle his uncle. "I can handle it." His voice growled in the burn of the alcohol, as he shoved the bottle back to the man. He pushed past him on his way for the door. In the questioning he felt bottled up and suffocated.

Derek followed him, grabbing his coat off the rack. "Obviously." It would seem that wherever John was going it wouldn't be without Derek. The soldier looked on edge, almost ready to talk someone off a ledge. The man knew he wouldn't be welcome, but above anyone else, he knew what was needed. Derek Reese had seen that look before more than once in his life. He had it himself for a time and it was only fitting to show patience to a boy who would grow into a man who had shown the same to him on one terrible night many years from now.

"There you are!"

As the two were about to leave, a perky blond in a rolled up shawled sweater over a low cut tank top appeared in the dining room. Her honey hair glimmered in the overhead light and there was an attractive smile on her lips as she sauntered over to the two of them. Derek rolled his eyes and John looked confused and borderline unhappy to see her.

John addressed Riley Dawson bluntly. "What are you doing here?" He asked as unkind as anyone could muster in their heart for unwelcomed sights. It made the girl recoil at the strike thrown at her unannounced appearance. John and Riley's last encounter was at the dress shop which had ended with John getting slapped and the girl racing into the rain without a ride.

"Your mom invited me." She let the unfriendly tone in John's voice slide off her. It made the boys contort into the same inherited suspicious frowns. The teen wheeled to his uncle for confirmation. Derek gave a long sigh and gave a curt nod of annoyance.

John narrowed his eyes. "Why would she do that?" He asked more to Derek than to Riley. There was no mistaking to anyone who spent even the briefest of moments with Sarah Connor that she loathed her son's girlfriend. So it seemed almost out of the blue that she, of all people, would invite Riley Dawson to this "cookout" in their home.

She shrugged with a shake of her head. "Maybe because she knows that I care about you." She forced in retaliation to John's tone.

"Sure." His retort was short and curt. She looked like she was on her feet, thinking of how to structure their conversations, more than feeling them. Sometimes, most of the time, their talks felt like chess matches.

The girl moved her bishop. "If I didn't, I wouldn't have saved you a plate?" She wiggled her eyebrows as bubbly Riley entered the game. John exchanged a look with Derek. His uncle was wondering the same thing that John had been starting to notice weeks ago … they were having two different conversations with the same words.

"Oh come on!" She waltzed up and took John's arm. "Kacy's boyfriend grilled and everything." She was smiling ear to ear taking an unstable mixture of combustible emotions into a crowded space. Derek gave sigh in frustration, knowing just how clueless the girl was, and how volatile John was now.

Before entering the kitchen John had freed himself from Riley's grasp, hanging back as she waltzed inside with an owner's arrogance. This attitude seemed to silently offend Sarah Connor who was leaning against the kitchen island in conversation. John's mother wore a soft dark blue collarless long sleeve and jeans. The familiarity and beauty in her presence was a soothing supplement to the growing infection, an aspirin to dull a great pain. She seemed to sense his presence even before her eyes had found him. She pivoted to look at him.

But Sarah recoiled as he walked into the kitchen. There was something visibly wrong with John and now everyone could see it. He didn't look sick or pale. There was just something off, something haunted about the young man. John did not enter wearing the emotion on his sleeve. In fact he might have been oblivious in his struggle to control what was inside him.

"Uh, hey, John … glad you could make it!" Kacy, their neighbor playfully jabbed at the boy cautiously. She along with his mother could feel the chill in the air, the dimness in his entrance. "It's too bad, Trevor wanted to meet you. He had to go." She explained of her cop boyfriend. John just nodded while Riley slapped the plate in front of him.

"You should just try the Tri-tip, John. It's like the best thing I've ever eaten!" She announced to Kacy.

"Isn't it though?" The woman replied. John watched the two go back and forth. Kacy and Riley had hit it off famously from their first meeting. They spoke the same languages, over the top and bubbly. It suddenly became clear that Kacy might have had something to do with Riley being here, putting a bug in Sarah's ear trying to "help" with their relationship situation. All his mother had to do was let slip that he and Riley had a fight, and Kacy knew exactly what to do.

This party, if it could be called that, had been put off for months by all of them. Trevor was a cop, Kacy was nosy, and Derek was a fugitive. But in the suburbs these things were like crack to the neighborhood association types. If they didn't get their fix, than they'd start scratching. But all their nails were doing was scratching on a seal of explosive fuel.

From the dining room, Derek Reese walked into the doorway of the kitchen, unnoticed. His hazel eyes focused on John as he stood next to an engaged Riley. The boy's look seemed more distant than ever, his jaw set grimly. Sarah Connor seemed to be the only one who noticed him as she walked to the sink. They exchanged wordless eye contact as he leaned on the door frame. He shook his head in warning when she snuck a glace to her son, silently querying her partner in the utmost alarm in a private language of their own. When the raven haired mother returned to the island she began to think of ways to end the night.

"Yeah, the prom is a big deal …"

"I know, I keep hearing that … But, honestly, I don't get why."

"Oh my god, shut up, Sarah tell her it's a big deal."

"…"

"Oh come on."

"It's a big deal, Riley."

"See even Sarah thinks so."

"I bet you had a fun time at your junior prom, Mrs. Baum. A little bird around here told me that you were a cheerleader and homecoming queen. Right John?"

" …"

"**I can't remember." **

"You could've just said, yes!"

"Hahaha … ohmygod! If you can't remember all that than that means you probably had too much of a good time, Mrs. Baum."

"There's no such thing, girlfriend. So are you and John doing the limo and the whole works, because I know Cameron is going."

"Yeah I picked out a dress, but John hasn't seen it yet."

"Oooh, Sarah you got to let me come over that night when they go to the prom. I want to see the pretties!"

"John hasn't said he was going, yet."

"Oh he's going …"

"You bet he is, I'm gonna make him look good."

"Don't you ever just get tired?"

The conversation stopped abruptly when John broke in. His eyes were dark and distant when he turned on Riley. Everyone in the room noticed the change in his voice the built anger and frustration in his tone. Their chatter, the endlessness, the meaninglessness of all their words exasperated the wound. Now the scar inside him turned from shock into something else.

"Of prom?" Riley chuckled, glancing at Kacy. The woman smirked into a red solo cup.

John looked down at the embrace she had his arm in. "Of yourself." He spat raising his glare to meet her crystal eyes. Kacy's eyebrows touched her hairline and his mother did a double take at the venom in which he dressed the girl down.

"What's that supposed to mean?" the blond girl glanced in shock at the other female occupants of the island before it came back to John. In her tone she tried to keep everything light, but a touch of red filled her cheeks.

John ripped his arm out of her hold again. "You talk …" Was his only response to her counter question. "You talk, and you talk, talk, and talk, and talk!" He suddenly, violently, swatted her cup off the island. The action made everyone jump back in surprise, while Derek moved into the kitchen behind Sarah. "You don't ever say anything of importance, you don't mean anything you say, and worst you don't know about anything you talk about! But here we are, and all you do is talk! Don't you ever get tired of the waste that comes out of your mouth?!" He gritted his teeth. "Don't you ever get tired of the lines that get fed to you?!" he asked.

Riley's eyes lit up like Christmas tree lights. Her eyes were as big as silver dollars for just a beat. To Sarah, Derek, and Kacy, this conversation seemed nonsensical. But to John and Riley it was the unraveling of a coil, the first hole in a sinking ship. Riley quickly retreated from the kitchen.

"I think I'd better go." She said to everyone else. "I hope you're happy John?" She snapped at him with intense eyes as she stormed away. But he followed her into the living room like a possessed man. He quickly grabbed her arm once she had her things and was fleeing toward the exit. He pulled her toward him.

He looked her in the eyes. "Is there anything I can say, huh?" He shook her. "Anything I can say to make you feel?" He shook her again. "You're Fat! You're ugly, you're dumbest dullest whore on the planet Riley Dawson!" he screamed in her face. But to the verbal abuse Riley said nothing. The shocked blond looked more frightened than affected. Her response brought a broken smirk on his face.

"You don't feel it …" He shook his head. "Nothing I say, it's all blank behind those eyes … You wanna know why?" He asked her, as he asked everyone now watching the drama unfold before them. "It's because you don't care." He snorted. "You don't care what I have to say, you don't care what happens to me, you don't even give a damn if I were to treat you like garbage!" He was in her face, his eyes seemed as black as night itself now. "You're just doing a job aren't you?" He asked. Riley looked like a deer in the headlights, still and unmoving.

He shook his head as he let her go, pacing away. He kept his back to everyone. "You know, there's a girl up there." He gaze went ascending up the staircase. "That I haven't stopped thinking about since I met her. Everyone in my life tells me that I'm wasting my time, that she can't …" John didn't finish his thought; he just let the pain trail off. "And here I am, a year later, real girl, and I still can't get her to feel!" he laughed to himself with all the mirth inside him. "Now I have two girls in my life that have said they loved me." He turned back to Riley. "Maybe both of you were lying, but I know one thing for sure." He walked till he was face to face with the blond. "Only one of you would care if I die tomorrow." There was a tension that to the outside world could be misconstrued as misplaced. From John to Riley it felt as if there was a gun to the blonds head. That all in the room had suddenly walked into a life or death interrogation.

Crystal eyes faltered for a long moment, in the inhuman gaze of John Connor. She seemed afraid of the piercing darkness within him. She looked out at the unfriendly eyes of Sarah and Derek who were watching in confusion, but still staunchly suspicious. Finally with all her meager strength and inner will she took a step closer to John.

"It would be me, John." She touched his cheek. "I would care." Tears welled in her eyes as she tried to turn the mood of the room. Brazen in her salvage of the situation, she moved her lips closer to his. She would prove herself in front of everyone. But before her kiss hit home, John turned his head, so all she got was his cheekbone.

"Go home Riley." Was all John said when he pushed her away. In his green eyes, he saw her true loyalties and motivations. Like a membrane stricken, all that retreated from the girl returned in a huff of anger.

"Just like that?" She asked.

John took a sharp intake of air. "Just like that …" He didn't look like a boy any longer when he was drawn to her. Something inside was dragging him down, he looked hardened and aged from deep within.

The girl gave one last gaze around at the occupants of the living room. While Sarah and Derek seemed staunchly against her, as always, Kacy seemed more interested in the drama of it all. The new mother seemed like the sort of person who was happiest when things anywhere were tense and she wasn't involved. With no support anywhere to be found, the blond relented to the youth's order.

"I hope you're proud of yourself, John. Really proud of how you've treated me after all the things I've done for you." She snapped to save her pride as she walked out of the home, slamming the door. Suddenly, "The Wizard of Oz" went flying after her just as the large crack of the door shook the house.

John Connor was a caring young man. The people who loved him sometimes thought he cared too much. But he would not stand for someone trying to guilt him, or manipulating that impulse with parting words. In such a flayed state the inner demon showed itself for the split second in crazed eyes as he launched his mother's half read book at the girl's parting figure.

When she was gone, an awkward silence crept over the now silent house. Kacy looked frightened for a moment, afraid John would turn on them. Sarah, not overly familiar with the darkest impulses in John's soul, saw herself in John in that moment and felt ashamed. Derek Reese just sighed with a rub of his soul patch. He alone in the room knew this John very well from his time with him in the future and was unfrightened of him or ashamed. He simply knew there was no reasoning with the force of nature at this point.

The boy however did not lash out any further. He closed his eyes as his body went rigid. His posture and action in those seconds were almost cartoonish. It was as if he had swallowed an atomic bomb and detonated it inside himself, while holding it in. He took a deep breath while he balled a fist, in his left, while his right massaged it. When he exhaled finally his body shrank, and Kacy almost expected fallout smoke to be blown out of his mouth.

Calmly, John walked toward the door and gingerly picked up Sarah's book. When he turned toward his family finally, he was shaken. He looked raw and tired, shadows seemed to haunt the bottoms of his eyes. He was in the grips of a deep heart sickness from the sudden misplaced grief that he could not shake.

"I'm sorry" He apologized to Sarah tiredly.

She didn't address her boy, she simply nodded worriedly. He returned the action. "You don't have to leave Kacy … mom needs the company." Their neighbor didn't have to say anything.

She looked to be discretely eyeing the backdoor. "Okay …" There was a tender maternal side to her smile from the intensity of new motherhood. John waited till the women left to speak to Derek. Sarah lingered a moment, seeing the secretive looks between John and Derek next to her. But when Kacy called for her she left, though not without watching the two of them with suspicion.

"Someday you're going to have to fill us in on what that was about." Derek finally spoke.

The young man stared right through his uncle. It made him pause and retract a step as if under accusation of something. "Soon enough." John sounded older than his years. It was the opening and the ending of the only thing John would say to him for the rest of the night. Deep hazel eyes watched the boy trudge up the stairs, almost physically hobbled by his emotions as he disappeared into darkness.

John Connor stepped onto the top floor of the family home in a daze. Troubled and winded from his outburst of emotion, he felt it all stirring inside his chest. The release of the pressure within him did not help; instead it felt like a thunderous rush of water against a weakening dam. Anger, Hatred, fear, and sorrow it all threatened to break him.

But as he passed to the door of his room, his attention was ensnared by the soft alluring sound of classical piano music. He halted his shuffled walk to his room, and let it seep into him, before he looked for the source. The tranquil music was leaking softly from underneath the crack of the first door on his right in the narrow white hallway. He stared at the glow of lamplight underneath and the shadow that passed back and forth in movement, almost timed to the composer.

He knew whose bedroom it was and what she was doing. Yet, he was drawn toward it … toward her. Raising a fist, he paused before he rapped upon her door. John gave it a thought for a moment, not sure he would be able to face what was behind it. With so much inside him, such a painful poison, slowly killing him, to see her might be too much for him to handle. There was a danger in just a simple hello in this moment of his trouble. So, gently, he turned the knob and pushed open her door just a crack.

The smell was toxic from the moment stuck his head inside. It was a mixture of a sweet pea moisturizer, and a nameless familiar self-produced scent that was perfume to his nostrils. Through the crack in the door he saw a soft glow of her lamp shade that cast a graceful silhouette that moved across the wooden floor.

It was a simple dim light, but to hurt emerald eyes suffering from the deepest of longing it might as well have been ethereal. He knew from the moment he saw her that this feeling was unnatural. That he was holding on too tight to what should've been a phantom of self-imposed notions of human romance. But then there were nights and moments like this, when she moved so fluidly in her floating white dress, so passionately to the sound of piano and strings. Creating something new, something unseen to what many considered to be timeless art of proven humanity. Just watching in her angelic light as she moved from one position to the other, translating motion into poetry, he knew this pain in his chest, this suffering in his soul … it was all worth it to have something so profoundly beautiful and unique in his life. In John Connor's world of war and darkness, a machine, his great enemy, alone in these few precious choreographed steps to Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody had made it all worth getting up to face a new hell on the horizon of every morning till the end of time.

"John?"

In the minutes he had been watching her, transported away from the known world he lived in she had finished her routine. For the few beats after the music had stopped he had just been watching her alone as if transfixed by some godly creature. Even at the call of his name he did not respond, till she had met him in the doorway.

"Are you alright?" She asked searching his eyes.

He blinked. "You know the answer to that." He leaned on the doorframe, dipping his head.

She followed him, her face lightening despite a stoic nature. "I do." She nodded with just a hint of sorrow hidden within blank eyes. She studied him a moment longer. "Why did you come here?" She asked quietly. He knew what she meant when no one else would that lived. It was not a question of what he wanted. It was a question of why did he come here when all it would do was hurt him, something she never wanted to do again.

He met her eyes and let them be the clairvoyance in the fog of darkness that clouded everything inside him. "I had to make sure you're here." He nodded. "That you're really here." He knew it didn't make any sense when it was spoken out loud. The cyborg frowned at his comment in confirmation of his fears.

"I'm always here."

John paused. "Promise?" He asked quietly, yet with so much of peace of mind riding on the simplest of answers. There was a silence between the two of them as golden orbs melded to emerald. She saw through them, understood everything and saw the danger and hope in the question.

There was only one truth to that question, and that was that Cameron would stay with John Connor every hour, every second of everyday till the day before his last. Fore on the day she died … The immortal cyborg would not have to live to see John's last breath knowing she could not save him nor spend even a moment without him.

"Promise."

His hand wiped away a single tear that fell from his eye from everything not said between them. But when all he wanted to do was hold her in his arms, he just gave the beautiful cyborg the roughest and most tortured of smiles. "Good night, Cameron." He said softly with a courteous nod.

"Good night, John."

Gently he closed the door to her room and moved on. He didn't bother closing his after entering. John's hands were shaking when he reached the foot of his bed. His body drawn to the conjoining Bedroom door, knowing that everything he could never dream about was beyond it.

When he moved to sit down at the end of his bed, John missed it in his state. He slid to the floor with a thump, soundlessly placing a hand on his forehead. Under buckled control, he breathed harshly, shoulders shaking as if sobbing. His body absorbing all of the emotions wanting to tear him to pieces as it all caught up to him. John's whole body fidgeted and jerked to the sound of strangled low repressed sobs as he covered his face with a closed fist.

He thought he had lost her tonight.

Striding cautiously to the doorway, Derek Reese took in the sight in front of him. His whole frame slouched in unseen sympathy while John writhed quietly, his chested heaving. There were no words spoken, no questions of what had happened. The soldier only sat on the end of the bed next to the boy, sharing the view of the conjoining door knowingly. After the first audible sob, his hand found John's head. There was nothing more that night, neither words of denouncement or comfort. There was just one hand, from blood to blood, that rubbed and patted John's head as he released everything that had taken him from the first moment he opened a slab in the morgue.


	4. The Mission

Embedded amongst the miles of rubble was the Los Angeles River, which snaked a path through the destruction. In the days of civilization the small creek was held back to be nothing but a trickling stream of polluted and dirty water. After Judgment Day it had lived up to its name. In the two subsequent battles over the reservoirs in the first years of the war, the machines had blown the dams in the hopes of washing away the entire left flank of the resistance army that had dug in inside the natural trench for defense against the first machine offensives. The inky black river filled with festering contaminated water spilled in a rush over the ducts and sewers, submerging an entire underground culture of Los Angeles history and drowning more than six thousand soldiers and civilians in the tunnels.

On the banks of this new and treacherous body of water stood a solitary church amongst the ruins of an old Spanish mission. Protected by a thick wall covered in carbon scoring from constant use as a fortification for machine and man alike, the church commanded a view of the river front, its ancient bell tower overlooking the entire sector. The entrance was guarded by a screeching gate of cold rolled Spanish iron. Lying in piles of rust, nearly unrecognizable after all the years, were burnt endoskeleton remains from a mix of many battles long ago. Within her plaza was a courtyard of pink cobblestone that had years of ash and smog stains muting the vibrant colors. Flanking the church on the left and right were conjoining adobe buildings, meant as a smaller chapel and mess hall for the Spanish garrison, were now converted into makeshift barracks for the doctor's and a patient's ward. In the time of combat it had been used as the headquarters for the endless battle to hold the river crossings. Now it served as an out of the way aide station for the bored and relieved soldiers.

In the times before Judgment Day, the old Catholic church had long been dwarfed by the grand glass and steel spectacles of tall towers that touched the Southern California skies. It had watched a small community become the center of many universes, all but forgetting what the town had once been. She was a silver dollar lost in the cushions of a much larger couch built around her. It now seemed only fitting that when that civilization had come to an end, she was once again relevant in the skeleton of the devolving society that had once had no time for her. A heavy iron-studded wooden door of thick oak was accompanied on each side by scorched stone statues of two nameless saints, cloaked and sinister in their obscurity, standing sentry in warning to any that might enter to do harm. They were shadowed by two gas lanterns that swayed to and fro in the horribly frigid breeze of the long night. From afar it was as if the church had eyes of her own, ever vigilant.

Past the doors in the interior was a shadowed room lit by lantern and generators that no longer had the look of a chapel. Above, on the far wall, was a large crucifix that kept sacred watch over a host of hospital beds and first aid stations. Make shift surgical rooms were behind every door and in every private area that could be found. They had taken the place of the altar and confessional, from the rookery to the candle room. On the floor was the stained scars of blood from thousands of men and women who had sworn to protect the last of humanity from extinction. Every room within the church had heard each desperate prayer and seen every desperate moment of doctor, nurse, and wounded. They had always come, before this war and during, each looking for salvation of some kind in their desperate hours within these very walls. Though the battlefields had moved on, and there was never a need for a frontline station again in the closing gasps before the end of a mechanical god's dream. The scars and horrors of this place lingered in every man and woman alike who wished to never again see the inside of this burned out church as long as they lived.

But even on quiet nights such as these there were still patients to attend to. Not every injury was machine related, and for new recruits the famed ruins of Los Angeles could be harsh to them on their first tour of duty. In this command there were only two types of soldiers, those who were just beginning military service with Tech-Com and those who were on their way out. Those old men and women of the "Glory Days" of the Resistance were few as it was. Most of the trouble in this sector was certainly trying to keep the recruits from killing each other out of boredom.

Boredom—that was a good excuse for what had happened to Private Shellback, Brian Garvin. He wasn't exactly one of the old men, but he had seen some things in his time in the service. He thought it would help for the way he was feeling, but it didn't. He had been the sonar officer on the USS Jimmy Carter when it was sunk. He had seen liquid metal take place of the object of his unrequited love. He had lived through the Paradox Eater and The Phantoms of the Hex when Goodnow had come back to kill him. All of it should've cleared his conscious; all of it should've made him like Jesse, so used to hell. But when he closed his eyes he could still see a man struggling to get up while they stomped on him. He could still feel the roaring of curses curl his blood as they fit a noose around his neck. But when he came back from his guilty memories, his tooth ached even more.

"You're done …"

He was startled into a loud echoing gasp by a French accented voice. The blue eyed nurse was young, maybe even pretty underneath her nun's habit. She stared at the communications officer in puzzlement, as did the rest of the bored staff. But the curiosity lasted only a moment longer. "Go!" She shooed him away sternly with a motion of her hands. Garvin slipped off the gurney bed and began cautiously slipping away under a host of strange looks.

What she had given him for his broken tooth and messed up jaw didn't seem to be enough to actually work. But he understood and was getting used to being a part of the infantry, which meant you made use of what little you would be given. Many of the guys said that it would make "even him" into a man. Truth was that he had hardly seen combat in all his years with the Resistance. He was the Sonar Officer, than he worked at regiment Headquarters, before he was shit canned after the Professor Von Rothbart incident thus landing him in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of new recruits who didn't even know what a damn IPOD was. He could talk a good game, recall past engagements to fool the new guys into respect, but honestly it was only because he had "Answered the Phones" during the engagements thus knew particular details that most of them did not.

But as he exited the church he wondered if what they had done this evening could be considered combat. If the "justice" they had committed was worth all this doubt and sickness in his stomach. He was not sure, and though he knew by the book it was, and by what they all believed it was righteous, it hardly felt that way. Was this the way all soldiers felt? This gnawing doubt of what they had done and how it stays with you. When all along, Garvin felt in his gut that what had happened was not war, was not justice, but murder. Even with the knowledge of what the man was trying to do, what he was going to do.

"_It wasn't right, Garvin!"_ He heard an Australian accent in his head, soothing his guilt. _"It's against everything we've ever stood for! Is this what your mother and sister died for? Huh, Garvin, for this to happen?!"_ She pushed him both mentally and physically. He didn't disagree even when he knew the answer in his heart.

Sweat began to pour down his face as he picked up his pace toward the exit. He could feel a thousand suspicious eyes upon him, haunting his steps. Over and over again he could hear his friend's voice of righteous indignation over the screams of protest and curses of a man dying slowly. In the stain glass saintly figures were hanging from trees, there sacred eyes open, staring unblinking at the blood on his hands that no water could wash off. When he lifted them they were clean, but in the gaze of the suffering man hanging from the cross above him and to the communication officer's very own they might as well have been bathed in the thick iron of sticky red liquid. When he reached the door, he threw it open as a suffocating man in a container without holes. Without a word he raced out into the night. When the door closed behind him there was not a soul inside the church but a nun folding blankets in concentration.

The night air was stiff with the smell of a foul stench from the river. It was salt water mixed with toxic runoff creating an unpleasant smell that got deep down in the lungs and made you feel a shade of green not found on the color wheel. Garvin welcomed it like an old friend as he stood in the mission's shadowy plaza of lantern light. The fresh air and open would help clear his mind, or he had hoped. He would make his way back to the barracks and hopefully he'd feel better about everything in the morning.

With an unpleasant sniff of the air, his boots crackled on shuffled stone for a foot or two before he heard quiet voices. He turned and found a couple sitting on a stone bench wrapped in charred ivy. The man wore a long issued overcoat of an officer. On his lap was a red haired girl that looked barely sixteen. She wore blue surgeon scrubs. Together soldier and doctor were talking of a future on a farm, snuggled into one another looking at the stars.

Slowly they felt the presence of Garvin's stare. The handsome Latino man had a trimmed goatee covered in blood, his jaw seemed broken and locked into place. Around his neck a vicious purple band bit into his skin, bruised permanently. Joining the greyed dead eyes of the man was the red haired beauty. She slowly followed the man's gaze till it fell on him. She was gorgeous and a horror to look upon when her left eye socket had been ripped away to reveal metal. The camera eye glowed an angry, vengeful red when it fell upon him. He nearly fell over with a startled gasp at the sight, tripping over his feet, catching the stone wall for balance.

"What the hell is that guy's problem?"

The red haired doctor of nearly thirty years asked her husband who she was completely burrowed into for warmth. The scruffy man just glared and shook his head at her. "Don't worry about him, babe." He muttered in annoyance petting his wife's hair. He craned a look to the communications officer who straightened up immediately at the sobering sight of one of the company's captains instead of who he thought they were.

"Sorry sir …" he nodded with sputtering visible breath of relief.

The man glared. "Get your shit together, Garvin, you fucking pussy." He shouted at the skinny man in his anxious departure from the plaza.

The soldier watched his back while walking into the open street. In front of and behind him were a collection of casual shadows that passed seen and unseen from the collection of fallen concrete, rusted metal, and rebar from the skyscraper graveyard surrounding them. In the darkness of the night there was a boundless energy from the occupants of this desolation. Call them old habits or a new way of life, but for many their days start at the end, an entire generation's lives spent in the darkness. Forever perplexed by what they found underneath the endless debris of a lost civilization that they called home now. Who were these angelic people on the covers of these books of glossy paper? Did they have a name? Did they still exist? Did these broken tablets do something of importance? Did this handheld device with a cracked screen actually play music at one time? Like the many hundreds of years after the fall of Rome in the ancient world there was a darkness coming to those who would see the end of this terrible war to end all wars. In place of technology of their forefathers a new brand of superstition and ignorance would spread. It was a world Garvin would not be a part of if he could help it.

Maybe that was the key to getting through this madness that had taken him. The thought that what had happened tonight would be their ticket out of this hell. Even though what had been done was not sitting right, it was a sacrifice of conscious to do something bigger and more important than a thousand lifetimes of normalcy. Underneath all the moral ambiguity and the compromises they could actually change the course of history for the better. Just standing on the ruined street he could almost smell the ozone again of the past around him, imagine what it would be like to see this place intact. If Jesse was right, he would see it all in person. He was filled with such irrational hope for his future in the past.

But it was cut short by a predatory gaze.

Across the old broken asphalt street was a twisted and oddly shaped lamp post that had been partially melted by a flame thrower. Leaning against it was a tall silhouette, with a smoking pipe in his mouth, watching the skinny man standing in the dim fringes of the mission's lantern light. He was struck with a pang of fear in surprise and in a gut instinct of a survivalist's certainty that for some unknown reason, the shadowy figure had been waiting for him.

There was a fizzle of a new flame as a fingerless gauntlet struck a match alight against the pipe. The slightest of a glimmer revealed a double breasted coat of beaten leather and black combat grade trousers with a single crimson stripe down the leg seams. Lighting the contents inside, he blew out the match with the first puffs of blue smoke. In the light half a face was obscured in shadow. A thin facial scar that ran diagonally across an eye was outlined in the glowing embers of the pipe. With each puff, a crimson light touched shadowed haunted eyes that held a steely glare, like a cold gust through a thin shirt. They were sharp and predatory, and like the thousand eyes and one inside the church, they could see the blood on Garvin, and all of the skinny man's grievous sins of the evening.

There was a visible tremor in the man's frightened frame as he moved a hand to his jaw. The excitement of flayed nerves had brought a new ache to his broken tooth. He would never know, as did any man, how just the smallest, most minuscule actions or words could seal one's fate. Brian Garvin rubbed his broken tooth in a wince and gave a shaky nod of acknowledgement to the man who knew all he needed to in the innocent action.

His sputtered visible breath frothed unevenly. "Freaking cold, eh?" There was a lisp in his voice from the cap on his tooth and bruised jaw. The man leaning on the light pole said nothing, not a word, not a flinch of a feature. He simply puffed on his curved mahogany pipe, and watched him with unblinking cold eyes, like a lion watching a hobbled zebra.

Not waiting to press his conversation, Garvin nodded as if he had been answered. He moved down the ruined street keeping the shadow in the corner of his sight. His damning gaze followed the radio operator as he passed with a dangerous flicker, like a caged animal pacing back and forth. As he walked down the street he could feel eyes burning a hole through the back of his head. It was like heat ray vision melting the bolted safeguards over his anxiety. The longer his stare held, the more the guilt seeped into him. By the time he was half way down the street he was shaking violently, the voices entering his mind again. The blood and shouts, the foul curses laid upon all of them, and of all else the body twitching and wiggling as if dancing, before he became so very still.

He couldn't take it anymore, while the bile rising in his throat came to stay. He rushed over and retched behind a charred cement wall of an overturned sidewalk. He supported himself as he threw up all the contents of his stomach, for the second time that day. He was suddenly so cold and shaken as he stood up straight. He felt as if he had crossed the wrong wires in his brain, everything twitching and not working right in his body. Quickly he turned back and was possibly more frightened to find that there was no one there.

That was what he needed to see to know that he had to get back. The barracks were just three blocks away. Brian Garvin spent every moment walking through those familiar remains of millions of lives and histories jumping at shadows the entire time. It didn't matter how much of a rational brain told him that he had to be imagining it, he knew that he was being followed, being hunted. Covering the last two blocks was the most frightened he had ever been in his life, and that was with being attacked by an undead Goodnow. What was worst was that there was no sign, no indication to confirm his anxiety. Behind him was no shadow, no crunch of gravel under tread, not a soul trailing in the dark of the night.

Most of the communication officer's unit had commandeered and occupied the entire block of buildings at the edge of the mostly intact Old City. He was bunked up in an abandoned thrift store with two other people. His roommates, Ward and Simmons, a well-built soldier type of a guy and a skinny girl with a heart of gold were bound to be there. Most nights he'd consider himself unlucky, feeling like an unwanted third wheel when they started having sex. But as he threw open the glass door he considered it another blow to his sanity to find that for once he hadn't walked in with Ward's head between Simmons's slim legs. Darkness of the dusty exterior of the abandoned store with bare, pillaged shelves and racks that had been hung with old clothes met him. In the entrance near the store front window were three cots arranged around a rusted metal brazier filled with burning hot coals aglow.

He quickly shut the door behind him and locked it. He stuck to the dark corners of the entrance, checking the ash stained brittle glass of the door. For a long time he kept watch over the sightlines of his lodging. He was never quite satisfied with the feeling of safety, but as the minutes passed he felt more content to believe his fears to be inside his mind, than outside his door. With a long sigh the submariner looked back into the dark store and shook his head.

Behind the counter was a small private bathroom that they had been using. Maybe what he needed was something cold on his face to shock him back into the world. Surrounded by something familiar, locked into a secure building, there was a calm that slowly began to repair the tears in his mind that his anxiety had ripped. Walking past the open wood paneling with a sign on the door alerting anyone about to use it that it was for employees only, the skinny man entered the dingy closet. He always noticed that even decades later the stained smell of old coffee permeated through the small room that contained only soot covered toilet and porcelain sink. Resting next to the drain and faucet was an issued bucket of sanitized water to wash and take care of personal hygiene with. Cupping his hands in the ice cold water, Garvin splashed it on his face and let out a gasp of shock. It immediately began to numb his nose and cheeks thankfully, helping his nerves settle.

It didn't last long.

Behind him in view of a small handheld mirror they used day to day was a twisting awkward figure hanging from the rafters. Garvin quickly turned to find that it was a mannequin from one of the ruined, uninhabitable stores. Around its neck was a familiar bungee cord that bobbed up and down. With a shout of fear, the radio operator stumbled out of the room as fast as he could. Boots shuffled backward in loud and clumsily steps out of the bathroom and back behind the counter. Small dark eyes were wide and the breath from Garvin's chest was uneven as he backed away in sight of the hanging mannequin.

SLAM!

Suddenly the door to the bathroom was thrown shut with force by a fingerless gauntleted hand. A familiar shadow appeared when it did. He was tall in the same leather coat, combat trousers, but this time he was cowled and his mouth and nose covered by an old blue scarf. All that was visible was shadowy eyes, dangerous and indistinguishable without light.

"Why did you murder him?"

There was a booming tremble to his voice that sounded like some terrible creature from the hellish depths of the sonar operator's worst nightmares. Cold water droplets mixed with even a more frigid sweat that built on his pale face. Garvin backed up till his lower back crashed into the counter. The force knocked the dusty cash register over. When it hit the ground it made a thunderous high pitched noise of cracking wood and a ring of the bell within. "I don't … I don't …" Was all he could repeat as he was now shaking violently. "What?" His voice took a higher octave and he shook his head in his innocent thespian performance.

The shadow sprang on him suddenly, like a violent flash of lightening. A hand struck out, grabbing ahold of Garvin's face. With a vengeful force of barely contained rage he slammed the submariner's head into the counter with an audible crack. It felt as if the weight of a mountain had fallen on his head as a sharp ache rushed through him.

"He! Need I repeat?" The demonic voice shook the dusty boards of the store. The voice, the images in his head, and the sickness spread within Garvin's conscious and heart came together in that moment. All of it overcoming at once pushed him into a helpless fight from the pressure mounting in his head.

"I don't know what you're talking about!" His answer made the predator reach back and strike him in the bruised jaw. It only made the man sob harder as he struggled against the heaviness that pressed him face first into the dust.

"Why you killed him, or I beat you to death." He warned with another cruel punch to the man's yellowing jaw.

"I don't know!" He lied through whimpered sobs.

Changing tactics, his aggressor grabbed his sleeve and ripped it away revealing a tilted black inked star tattoo on his wrist. He gave the man a deep-seated glare of hatred when spotted. "Where are they?!" He demanded with a roar of a terrifyingly boom sighting the marking on the man's skin.

A dazed Garvin just shook his head. "Who?!" He spat through watery eyes, barely able to speak.

His faked ignorance seemed to unleash the full power of his predator's rage. He grabbed the skinny man and lifted him above his head. With a heave, Garvin was flung over the counter, smashing into his cot. A cloud of dust and ash lingered above where he and his bedding had been spilled over with a painful crash. He coughed blood and tooth cap as he got to his feet. He was in an awful amount of pain and yet the survivalist inside that had gotten them out of J-day pulled him toward the door as fast as he could.

But as the submariner reached out for the handle there was a whirling sound of something sharp spinning by his ear. Garvin retracted his hand in surprise when a four pointed throwing star cleaved the door knob in two. He flinched backward when electricity surged in flashed webs of voltage from the star's center and bounced up the door's metal frame. His retreat was halted when he bumped into something solid behind him. He whirled quickly only to find a vice grip of a hand seize him by the neck. Both his small hands grabbed onto the padded wrists of the gauntlet as he was lifted in the air.

"Where the rest of them are … or that broken jaw will be the least painful injury of the night!" He was no longer roaring. The shadow was now cold and trembling in fury and effort in hoisting the communications officer in the air.

With all he held dear, Brian Garvin wanted to tell the man the truth. He wanted the pain to end, not just physically, but mentally and spiritually. But he knew that if he told him the truth he'd be stuck here forever, or worse … much, much, worse. Every time he wanted to spill all of which they planned all he could see was himself hanging from that tree. So he did all he could find himself to do at that very moment. He parroted what his friends would expect him too.

"I wouldn't tell you if I did!" He choked out.

It was the wrong thing to say. With a growl he was choke slammed to the floor. With a wheezed cough that made his throat sore, blood arced from Garvin's mouth in a squirt.

"No! NO! … NOO!"

A hand grabbed him by the back of the shirt and dragged him across the dirty floor. The minute blurry eyes saw the scolding brazier was his destination he tried to escape against stronger arms. He was set upon his knees and a hand twisted his thin bowl cut hair painfully. He screamed as his face was forced down close to the glowing coals inside.

"I've got all night!" The shadowy figure informed him with a dark hatred.

All the sweat on Garvin's face seemed to evaporate in the presence of something so hot. Even without touching the coals, the proximity to the heat stung the man's face. He sobbed each time a spittle of blood dripped onto the coals and the sizzled smell of himself filled his nostrils.

He cracked. "It wasn't right!" Garvin parroted what had been drilled in his head as rational when he himself detracted at the sight of the murder. "What he was doing with **it**! What he was going to do with **it**! It wasn't right, it, it, it … IT WASN'T WHAT WE DIED FOR!" He screamed through sobs feeling the heat kiss his cheek.

"Funny, I didn't see you at the "fall of Arcadia" or at the battles of "Topanga Canyon" and "Porter Pass". What could a glorified receptionist even comprehend about dying for a cause?" His captor asked in disgust as if Garvin was something he found in a latrine bowl. "Unless you want a free demonstration?!" He put more force pushing the submariner's head closer to the coals.

"No! Please, don't … NO!"

"Where are they?!"

"FLORES, Flores has … She, she, she commandeered a … a …"

**SISSSSS!**

"AN AUTOSHOP IN THE OLD CITY, FIFTY CLICKS FROM THE RIVER ON THE EAST BANK!"

Garvin's face stung in the cold air when he was ripped away from the inside of the brazier and slammed back onto the floor. The side of the uninjured part of his face was scorched and his stubbled cheek welted. He rubbed tenderly as tears fell on the very dry skin of his exposed cheek. Suddenly he was aware of the flick of leather and a metallic click.

The shadow drew a sleek chrome plated Colt from his back hip. The nicked and scarred weapon looked old and well used, its rubber handle taped for extra grip. The cowled man checked the magazine before sliding it back inside with a loud click.

"No, don't!" Garvin found his knees. His pleas were met with an obnoxious draw of the trigger. "Please, don't!" he placed his hands together as if to pray. He groveled to the intimidating shadow that had taken so much out of him already.

The man pointed the gun in between the former sailor's eyes. "You were ready enough to kill for a man's choice in _**brides**_ … you don't seem so ready to die for a prejudice you claimed to be a true believer in?" The tone in his voice made Garvin feel so small, so worthless. Somewhere he knew that had been stronger, less trusting, and not so easily led he wouldn't be here. For all of his final thoughts that were running through his mind, it made him feel angry and cheated out of his own life. Here at the end he wanted no more part of the schemes he had been party too.

"I didn't kill him!" He blurted in teary eyed frustration. "I just kept watch! I just … I just watched … he got loose, and I got punched … I didn't even touch him. I, I did nothing but watch." He started strong and angry to the man. But, as he reflected, his voice began falling away from even the situation. He looked off to the side as he spoke in a timid childlike voice as if he had strayed into a waking dream. Some strange reflection of an out of body experience he had suffered from during the murder. "I just watched." He shook his head as if he didn't comprehend or even recognize himself.

Cold eyes, shadowed under cowl, stared through the sailor's poisoned soul. After a long moment the man drew forward his trigger. Garvin watched him glare long and hard before he began to nod as if agreeing with him. "You're right." He spoke evenly while lowering the weapon to his side.

"It's only fitting to leave you last, so you can watch them bury Flores and the rest of your friends with _your one good eye_, before I come for you!"

"Good eye?"

A gauntleted hand grabbed a handful of Brian Garvin's hair and drove the side of his face into the searing coals of the brazier.


	5. Romeo & Juliet

**Romeo &amp; Juliet **

_Juliet the dice were loaded from the start  
And I bet and you exploded in my heart  
And I forget I forget the movie song  
When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?_

"_**Romeo &amp; Juliet" – Dire Straits**_

* * *

_Many Years Ago_

The moon rose high in the red ember sky stained by the maroon and golden lights and hazy mists of strange chemicals of a city that always looked afire in the distance. In the silvery moonlight it's broad illumination touched the dirty pavement and reflected off the frosted dingy glass dome of the aviary where the midnight birds chortled and chattered in the absence of the garish sun who was laid low by slumber. It's lack of presence breathing new life into this nocturnal world seldom seen by those who kept decent hours. There, where the exotic and foreign birds' song touched, was a vast wild of cages and buildings that intersected with one another. Together they housed the exotic and rare species of animals that had been taken from their homeland. They, like so many of their human counter parts, were bred in captivity. Destined to never see their place of origin, only the cage and the feeding hand of those who kept them alive.

The many species of animal were a spectacle to behold to those who had never traveled abroad. Each cage, each slit eye, and rustle of colored feathers ignited the flame of intrepid imagination to those who cared. Those who's interest lived each second vicariously through them, imagining, wondering what sights may behold in the fantasy of what lay out there in the far unknown world. But more and more, less and less people came. Inward had the youth become in the long years of progress. They were no longer interested in what was out there when a touch of an application on a phone, the key stroke of a computer would show them not just the animals they sought, but the animals in their own habitat. Not whisked away to a foreign land to become side show attractions. Wither it was the evolution of technology or a perceived notion of morality. The institution known as the Zoo was starting to become a dying business amongst a city of people consumed with the notion of progressive ideals and of moral and self-righteous sensibilities that they may pat themselves on the back while their own homes decayed around them.

Carried on the wind, was the slippery and wet stench of room temperature fish and habitat pools that came from the water animals exhibits. Always echoing into the night were the sound of the seals bark and the splash of a Penguins belly flop on the cold water. From the south was the chatter of the monkey area as they conversed and caterwauled from their open aired cages into the night. Their extra food always kept near and in crates stacked outside the ape arenas. The large, hairy, hunched primates roaring and thumping as they climbed the rock walls unsuccessfully, forever wondering what was beyond the plateaus that surround them. Sleeping habits within these walls and cages came and went in an environment where there was little to do, but be one's self and from time to time carry some staged, trained performance for the crowd that gathered around the animal's living spaces.

But only one now crowded amongst the animals. The security relaxed, unaccompanied by the lone guard who's only job was to watch for radical college groups out to make a point of animal cruelty, or even a drunk or two that had a need, in an inebriated stupor, only found ten minutes after closing time, to go see a penguin. The usual guard would have turned away most people, but it was hard to do when one was asleep on duty this time of night.

In attendance of the night tour of the drying up zoo was a dirty man of medium height. He had long dingy blond hair and a close cropped beard. He wore a tan shirt covered in filth and dusty baggy jeans. He always stank of cigarettes and booze, his teeth yellowed by his vices that crippled him financially. No one ever knew what his last name was, but he called himself Jim. Homeless on and off, he had come to Los Angeles in the early 90's wanting to be a part of the music scene. Guns and Roses, Nirvana, if it was grungy or metal he'd play it. Though, many people over the years had told him that he couldn't play, not even well enough to impress the lowest of dives desperate for live music. But there was a dumb charm and inherent candor to him that won people over, it let him coast through life. He took jobs now and then, but he liked it better just eating what he could from the generosity of others, while working on his "Music" hoping that in his mid-forties he'd make it big after almost twenty years of nothing.

But now that most good will toward him had run out in the changing alternative music scene, like a drying stream in a drought. He had come for the only free food there was to take, the food at the monkey's cages. Before the end of the day the staff and crew of the Zoo often left the monkey's food crates in reach of their pens. Rather than find a way to support himself, Jim found an endless meal ticket in the fruits and protein meant for Zoo animals. There he mocked and hooted at the creatures and beasts making them fit and bite, all of them sensing something dark within the man. They could feel it in his being, his days spent outside of high school hangouts, leering at the attractive ones, any of them. He was always charming them with his quirky "spaced out" casualness that sympathized with his unique "Realness." All the while he licked his lips as they looked away. Inside, always hoping, waiting, sometimes in a drunken haze of dark sickness for one of them to go out into the alley so he might take advantage one more time of another.

Tonight seemed no different than any other since he had sunk under the iron barred fence. Spending it feasting on a midnight meal, while throwing peals at the monkeys. But he was unaware that this time he was being watched by cold eyes filled with hatred.

"Come on, Come on … you want it?!"

The Madagascar native jumped up and down screeching angrily beating himself against the thick iron bars trying to get the food held by a dirty hand. He spoke with an unfiltered obnoxiously loud country draw as he teased the monkey. "Get it bitch!" He flung the fruit, hitting the caramel colored mammal in the face where it fell to the ground with a dusty thump. Seeing the food, several other primates of different origins and species leapt on it, only to find nothing inside it. The dirty "Musician" laughed at their fallen faces as they screeched in anger, while one or two began biting the aluminum beer can stuffed inside the Banana peel.

"Stupid fucks!" He grabbed a softened, overly ripe peach from another crate and bit into it obnoxiously. Yellow, crooked teeth made the peach squish as juice ran down his beard. When bitten down to the core, he reached back and wound up for a throw at the furry pile surrounding the banana peel when he started to notice that a shadow was beginning to form from above. Slowly it began growing till it engulfed him. At first he thought it was a wisp of passing clouds … till it didn't pass. He looked up in alarm, the half-eaten peach falling to the earth with a splat.

Standing on top of the monkey cage, was a tall silhouette, cowled and face covered. His field coat fluttered in the chilled pacific breeze as he stood against the moonlight. The figure looked down on Jim with inhuman eyes chipped from emerald. Inside was a storm as violent and elemental as a September hurricane.

For a week now, across town, a figure had been searching haunts and communities of the homeless. The rebellious youth and entitled professional panhandlers had been complaining to the police that a young man cowled by a hood and face covered by his mother's scarf had been breaking down the entrances of their makeshift shelters and intimidating and terrorizing any who wouldn't answer just the one question he asked. He was looking for man who had killed a girl, a man who left an infant Silverback's fur embedded in the wound that broke her skull. After being held to a flaming barrel one shelter kid finally spoke of one of their brethren who bragged about a never ending free meal at the zoo.

"Wha … wha …" Jim began backing away as the figure stood at full height, watching him. When he leapt off the cages, landing with a clap of boots soles in a crouched position, the grown man began to run.

The zoo was connected by four concrete islands that sat on a small lake where fish ponds and streams ran between the connecting bridges. All of them met at the center under a large oak tree, with deep roots and a bench. When the musician had reached the center of the zoo, he looked back. The monkeys were hopping up and down in zeal. They could smell, taste, and sense the fear from their tormentor in the sight of the cowled figure. But as for his stalker he found no sign of him. From across the bridge to the cages, there was not a trace or shadow of his sudden hunter. He tried to piece together in his anxious mind what exactly the guy wanted. For a moment he thought that he shouldn't have run at all, but from the first moment he saw him, all he wanted to do was to get as far away from those eyes as possible. He didn't think they were human, nor did they have any friendly intentions for him.

He would find that his instincts would serve him well when a powerful shoulder drove into his spine. Never having a filter for noise, he made a loud and dramatic roar as he fell flat into the creeks that separated the small concrete islands. The homeless man kicked and gurgled in the unclean water as he was washed down stream with the Japanese goldfish. He had traveled in the strong tide near the filter till he was able to touch the bottom with his feet and stand in the chest deep water. The musician was now soaking wet, black spots of slime dotting his cheeks and forehead as he sloshed through the water to the island closest to him. Climbing atop the hard surface he was not himself. The terror he felt combined with the merciless chill that iced his bones when his sopping form was hit by the cold of the night, it all shot his nerves and made him viciously angry. "I grew up in the country! You want to fight, I'll fight you, there's this spot just outside of town!" His density was shown in the uncertainty of what was happening.

He turned away from the stream, only to come face to face with the predatory eyes of a golden furred lioness. He screamed and fell backward as the female cat roared. The queenly animal thumped her head against the glass divider, sensing the prelude of combat in her blood. Jim scooted away on his bottom, scrambling to his feet when he deemed he was safe. He was under a chalk white big top cover. All around him were tall glass cages with the main attractions around him. It was a who's who of the Wizard of Oz variety, the lioness pacing her cage, while the grizzly moaned in interest, and the tiger … the tiger only crouched in the hay rushes on the cage floor. Its green eyes were watching patiently, dangerously, haunting each step the musician took. The movements and attitude taken as a cue from its kindred spirit that loomed in the shadows watching his prey.

He was completely terrified now as he whirled around the collection of cages, each animal looking the same. He could antagonize the monkeys, mock the apes. But surrounded by these goliaths, all stronger, faster, and more deadly than himself, he felt small and … hunted. It was human psychology when in a state of terror that you are drawn to a hiding spot, or to a position in which you felt safest. Some could draw up an entire psychological profile on the lone decision of what you chose. Up or down, high ground or the underground. But only the smartest hunter, the one who knew his prey well, knew that it was better to manipulate and shrink the ports of harbor from the storm he brought.

And so it happened that when Jim saw the staircase leading up to the top of the tiger's cage, he didn't think twice about anything else. His sandals slapped loudly on the rickety aluminum diamond grating, leaping over the "Staff Only" sign as he climbed quickly. When he turned back he saw a shadow growing from the exit. Reaching the apex, his feet plunked loudly on top of the clear plastic cover above. While inside, the tiger stretched, its eyes darting above. Slowly, the large striped cat began to pace below the figure waiting. The homeless man backed away from the stairs, before turning to watch the exit as a shadow grew and grew. Ever so slightly he began to make out a figure that was choosing cover trying to stealthily get inside the big top.

"I can see you, bitch!" He yelled with an accusatory point of a putrid index finger.

"Can you?"

He let out a frightened startle, his voice carrying obnoxiously, always hoping to find someone sympathetic. The cowled figure dismounted the staircase he had climbed soundlessly, though now his boots clacked on the plastic surface. Each pace was like the ticking of a time bomb ready to go off in the final ten seconds. The musician turned back to see a figure still coming closer, before back to what was clearly a younger man.

"Help!" Jim screamed in the hopes that it was the Security Guard hearing the commotion. When turned back, the cowled figure was still standing where he was. Between them was a clear sliding trap door where the staff lowered food for the tiger below.

The youth's eyes shined with a deep hatred. "What year?" He asked darkly, his voice muffled by the scarf.

"What do you mean?!" He yelled hoping to attract attention.

Emerald eyes narrowed. "What year are you from?!" His voice barked. The whip and growl echoed sharply through the cavernous surroundings. The tone, the power, the inhumanity, and it was enough to silence the musician. He was in the sight of something elemental, more than just a man. It was more than he could handle, to be in the presence of something so powerful, and worst was he didn't know what he was talking about.

All throughout his life, Jim had never been on the winning side of a physical fight. He always had someone on his side he could rely on to protect him. He had friends who guarded him, who directed him to stay out of the confrontations his thoughtless actions sometimes caused. But it would seem that for the first time, there was no one but him, alone with this enigma of a youth possessed by some enraged Aries. Faced with this out of control young man who demanded answers that didn't make sense, he knew there was only one way out. He figured that all he had to do was keep him occupied till the security guard got there.

With a grit of teeth he charged at the cowled youth, launching a heavy haymaker. But the young man was faster than he had ever thought anyone could be. He had waved and missed in a blink of an eye. Now over reaching his opponent, the shadowed figure grabbed the striking wrist and bent the dirty man's body over a striking knee in his gut. A thick string of Saliva flew from his open mouth that let out a violent gut wrenching noise from the back of his throat. Pressing his attack, the youth began hitting the man with a barrage of punches to his face, backing the homeless man down as he unsuccessfully tried to block them. His head felt numb, the stinging and ache all over his nerves when he finally stopped. In a smooth transition from strikes, the cowled figure twisted his opponents arm at an odd angle before flipping him over his shoulder. The minute Jim hit the plastic floor he felt something give way, his shoulders starting to sink.

"Where is he?!" The youth roared viciously.

"I don't know what you mea … ah!"

The minute the musician refused the cowled man's claims, a fist began pounding away at his cheek bone and jaw like a hammer. His face was plastered on the side of the plastic surface, each blow made him sink lower and lower till he was suddenly dangling head first in the air. He watched with a scream as the feeding slide door gave way, falling into the pen and onto the waiting tiger's tail. With an aggressive roar, the king cat leapt, swiping it's claws at the now dangling homeless man. Tips of his long knotted hair sprinkled down as the tiger landed back on the hay covered floor.

"The man who murdered Melinda Young! He's was here and you're going to tell me where he is!"

"I don't know who you're talking about, man!"

WGRRORWER!

"AHH! Please, I don't know!"

"You're a terrible liar _and I've got all night_!"

Inch by inch, hands made from iron, balled the filth covered long sleeve and slowly, mercilessly, lowered him down with each repudiation. There was a cold hatred as he intimidated with a dislike that went down to the core. Something haunted this man, darkening his soul, and it would seem in his mind that Jim had some part in it. That whatever he knew it was a threat to his very existence or … to the existence of the one person his life revolved around. The cowled figure didn't wince or flinch at the blood curdling scream as the tiger's third leap took with it a bloody clump of hair that was ripped from the homeless man's scalp. He only continued to lower him further and further downward. In a panic the man saw that he was now in full range of the tiger's leap. The beast waited a beat, ripping at the skin of the scalped hair knot, the taste of blood incensing the animal for more.

But just as the large striped cat began tightening its muscles in anticipation and crouching its hind legs, he was pulled up. The flash of claws swiped the air in a rush of a deadly breeze. He looked up to find that a pale slender hand was now holding him up, while an explosion of squeaks and thumping caught his attention. His attacker was now being wrestled away from Jim by a tall handsome man with cropped dark hair, and designer stubble. He wore a dark brown jacket and faded jeans. He had a distinctive look of a former soldier turned cop.

"Get off me!" The hooded teen struggled to get free and back at the homeless man. He looked akin to a wild animal, feral, and snarling as he was separated from his prey.

The homeless man was helped back to solid ground by another. It was a woman with milky skin that glimmered in the darkness. She wore a collarless waist jacket of black leather and wore a dark blue long sleeve Henley with all the buttons undone showing a pale pushed up cleavage. Despite the thick mane of long raven curls, and a hardened but still classically beautiful face, the look this warrior woman had in her frighteningly familiar eyes made him feel lower than dirt. He watched her stand, but before he could take his eyes off her slender body to thank her, she gave a vicious kick to his face.

Sarah Connor and Derek Reese, together, did not stop manhandling the cowled figure all the way through the side exit of the predatory animal's island. He ripped and twisted in their grip demanding they let go and fighting them all the way back to the main entrance of the zoo. When they finally exited the main gates, Sarah let go, while Derek tossed the youth back. He stumbled, sliding back first into a large bronze statue outside the gates of the Zoo that depicted a Lion chasing a heard of Zebra at a watering hole. Standing at full height to face the glowering looks, a hand ripped down the scarf over his mouth and nose, while drawing back the hood.

"What the hell are you doing?!"

All that was wrong with John Connor was more harshly shown in the silvery moonlight. His eyes were dark and sallow from too many sleepless nights. A growth of unhealthy teenage facial hair covered his jaw. The darkness that had stowed away inside the night he went to the morgue had spread, haunting him, tearing him apart. It left a scar, a reminder at all times of the day of how he felt in those moments when she was lost to him. It awakened madness in him, a rage deep within, a resolute determination to never feel that way again. To hunt, to stop the killer whose sole purpose for living now was to murder. To take away from him the one thing, the one being, in the universe he dreamt of. A girl that he lived for, that consumed all of him till he didn't know what was himself and what was her.

Derek Reese stepped forward. "You said you could handle this." He accused his nephew.

John matched his uncle. "I am!" He snarled. "That degenerate knows where that rat eating son of bitch is! A minute or so and I would've had him singing!" he gritted his teeth in a growl.

With a shake of his head, the junior officer turned his head to a quiet, almost frightened Sarah, before he went back to John. "He's a drunk, leech! You think he knows his own damn name, much less where a rogue soldier is?" He sighed with a look of doubt that pushed John deeper into anger.

"They found fur from an albino Silverback born here two weeks ago, there's only three in the world! One of them is here, in this Zoo. I know that bastards lying and now our only lead is going to be in County lock up, because of you!" He raged.

This time it was his mother who matched him. "You nearly burned that kid's face off with a fire barrel in the river ducts, and now you almost fed some homeless man to a tiger. John Connor, you're out of control!" She was stern and steely.

"He's a drunken pedophile! I didn't think I needed to lay down a mattress before I busted his head!" John roared.

Something in her son's voice, the casual justification for a brand of vigilante righteousness and extreme violence in his methods shocked and worried Sarah to her core. And in her worry came anger over what she knew was the reason she couldn't recognize her own son in this dark avenger of the night he had chosen to wear.

"No, this isn't about him being a Pedophile, or that punk in the sewer ducts being an anarchist. This has to do with what you think this "killer" is after. You've lost your way because of it, and you're out of control!" Sarah grabbed her boy by the front of his jacket, frustrated with him, frustrated with "it" and the way they respond to each other. "And it's all going to end right now!" She gave her son a shake, physically trying to make him see reason again after weeks of seeing him succumb to the anger and darkness within.

John ripped Sarah's hands off him violently with his forearm. He looked half crazed at the nerve she struck with her blunted honesty. "You don't know anything!" He spat in her face. But when he tried to walk away Sarah grabbed him back. She was however surprised and quickly outraged, when John returned the favor. His hands grabbing the supple leather of her jacket and twisting it in his own grip as she did his. The two began to grapple with one another in a mix of frustration and anger.

"Hey, that's enough!" Derek shouted at the mother and son who clashed physically, pulling on one another. The scarf around John's neck twisted tightly, while a silky nylon bra cup was slipping free from Sarah's shirt. "I said that's enough!" Derek forced his way between them, breaking their grip on one another. He shoved John against the bronze zoo statue, while he held Sarah back with an outstretched arm, his hand balling her open collar in a fist. The soldier turned to John, putting an index finger in the boy's face. "Enough." He said sternly. He repeated the same sentiment to Sarah, who looked like she could peal the skin off her child's face.

"Take a walk!" Derek motioned his head down the road, his intense hazel eyes focusing on the teen like prison tower spotlights. John looked ready for a fight, ready to grapple and lose to his mother. But after a long moment he pushed off the statue and slowly trudged across the empty city street and to a wooded parking lot.

When he was gone, he let go of Sarah. His action was rewarded by becoming the brunt of the scorned woman's misplaced aggression. The green eyed woman, snarled, driving the soldier back into the statue. She had pent up fury and anger over what had happened between her and John. As all good parents, she had restrained herself, eating all her training, reflexes, and passion till now. But once she had Derek pinned, she didn't press her attack. Instead she paced two steps away, running her slender hands through her curls, sliding them down to the base of her neck as if shedding her aggression. She closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. When she turned back, Derek was watching her.

Sarah Connor never apologized, she was never wrong, and she wasn't for anyone to understand. But of what "the mother of all destiny" never spoke, she made up for in reconsidering and redemption of rash and implosive reactions. Apologetically, Sarah helped her partner forward, straightening his brown jacket. With lightened eyes, the raven haired beauty placed a compassionate and unmovable hand under Derek's jacket where his heart was. In front of John and Cameron she might not have done anything, her authority not to be questioned, her dominance as head of the family absolute. But alone, in the privacy of just the two of them, they had a different relationship. At the placement of the hand, Derek just nodded as he always did, never possessing an ego that demanded a verbal acknowledgement of the wrongs he had been dealt.

"He's getting worse." Sarah said quietly staring at a silhouette disappearing into the shadows of the woods. Derek shook his head at her statement, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder.

"They both are."

* * *

**Magilla or Grod?**

That was the headline of the culture section of the newspaper and what the lead story was for their website. Everyone was talking about the strange occurrence that had happened when two Silverback Gorillas gave birth last week at the zoo. Always fluff pieces at the end of the ten o'clock news, when this happened, the people of the city were intrigued by the birth of the first Albino ever recorded in the city. It sent news services and bloggers scrambling for any sort of information they could find over the birthing of the gorillas, and what could or attribute to the albino gene in not only animals but humans as well. The fervor and public interest seemed to die down over the weekend, and it might have slipped most people's minds if not for the strangest of all things to be associated with the albino infant … A murder.

Melinda Young, former nationally ranked Ballerina till a foot injury during a performance of "Giselle" in London last winter retired her. The dance community mourned her loss for all of two minutes, before they're troubadour blood and petty competitions carried them onward. She was going to be someone the papers mourned, always ready to capitalize on a beautiful face and strange case. It was always a sure fire way to sales. But it wasn't till two days ago when her death and the newborn gorilla were found to be connected. During the autopsy, the county corner found fibers stuck in the girl's blood caked hair where it looked as if a strong man had bashed her head in. After several forensic tests it was determined that the fibers in the beauty's hair was in fact Gorilla fur. But not just any Gorilla fur, but fur from an albino. The investigators were hesitant to come down to the zoo, after it was later reported that the morgue had been a victim of a break in the night after Melinda was brought there. While Detective Lieutenant Jonathan Derek Reese of the LAPD Homicide Division had ordered his men to at least sweep the zoo for clues, the mayor swore that they'd find the hoaxers.

"Weird, huh?"

Golden eyes flicked from the illumination of the borrowed television where an animated mermaid, slim and beautiful, with flowing red hair swam around a cavern. It was filled with sunken objects of mystery to the teenage mermaid and the girl watching. But when addressed, the teen turned her attention away from the beginning of the musical number to the young man in the wheel chair. Eric was bearded with a head of tight blond curls and an evening edition paper in his hand. A copy of "Gorilla's in the Mist" was also sitting in his lap. Eric had been one of those who had become very interested in the new arrival to the zoo, and had been on "a kick" as Sarah Connor would say, studying the subject.

"Yes, very unusual." She replied politely.

Cameron Baum didn't want to be rude, but she had become too invested in this new movie to quite be as topically knowledgeable about primates. For most of the week Eric had been showing her essential movies for people of their generation. He had informed her that most people never knew how big the archives in libraries were when it came to movies and Eric had taken the time to compile what Cameron needed to know. She had found most of them fascinating. The world of Harry Potter was quite enjoyable and dense. Though, she didn't like "Tron" all that much. When pressed, she replied on the subject that she had been inside a large computer's mind before, and could honesty report that there were no light-cycles in her father's brain. But tonight when Eric pulled out "The Little Mermaid" she was fascinated but also had her trepidations. She had never seen an animated movie before, and since the popular stigma was that most animated features were for small children, she felt that it would under qualify for her interests.

But she had found herself to be completely wrong on the matter. While Eric waxed unabashedly on the beauty of the animation, Cameron had found Ariel's story almost completely relatable, subtracting most of the settings and characters. The subtext of the movie seemed to speak to her on a level like nothing she had ever seen in her life. She had been analyzing the feature quietly, till the moment that Ariel saw the prince for the first time. Something clicked in her mind as she watched the scene play out.

She knew that feeling that the mermaid had. She knew of the moment after all the times since you awoke in the world, you were told to stay away from him. That he and everyone like him were dangerous. Yet it's the never knowing, to quench the endless curiosity that none of your brothers and sisters seems to have but you, till it over powers everything, and you find you must look. Then you see him, your very own prince, smirking sadly, always sadly and always alone. Even when a young and dashing violin player with matching eyes teased him with a lilt of a sad song as he passed the table he did not look for company. He only longed for someone else that was not there anymore. Suddenly, he's no longer your enemy, no longer a fabled phantom filled with a dark heart that your father warned you about since your conception. She saw it in the mermaid's eyes and felt it in her own, reliving the past, the split second when she knew everything she was ever told, everything she ever was, and it was all a lie.

She no longer wanted to kill or hurt anyone, all she suddenly lived for was to know why he looked that way, why he was sitting alone, and most of all who he was longing for in that lonesome moment when their eyes met across the crowded room. It was a fascination that had become warped. Her mind was taken over like a disease, an infection. He was always there from then on and she couldn't stop it, till one day she realized she didn't want to stop it. This impulse inside wasn't a fascination, nor was it a disease … It was something else. Inside her was something she knew should be impossible, something that grew day after day, second after second. Yet, she couldn't pursue it, could not act on it. But each moment when they were so close to one another, just a door away, it was harder and harder to control. Even at this very second in the library she resisted the draw that seemed almost fundamental inside as powerful and natural as a magnet to his metal.

"It's sad …"

Cameron blinked when she turned away from the screen again after she had become completely engrossed in half her memory and half the movie. Eric had a book open and was shaking his head. He sighed looking up to watch as King Triton was revealed to have been following his daughter, seeing with dismay and hatred of the things she had collected of a world he despised.

"What is?"

Eric shook his head watching the building tension. "Oh, just this book …" He replied distractedly. "Apparently whenever a gorilla is born with a defect, its father kills it or they leave the baby for dead." He sighed again. "Can you imagine, your whole family turning on you, just because you were different?" He asked the cyborg. Golden eyes seemed oddly fragile for a blinked moment, not answering as the King's weapon lit the office they were sitting inside. Stoically the cyborg watched Ariel's father's rampage, destroying everything she held dear, everything she ever wanted, all because it wasn't natural.

"_Because, Daddy, I love him!" _

"Are you okay?"

Cameron had paused the movie as the teenage mermaid curled atop a flat rock. The cyborg quietly slid out of the leather chair she occupied, placing the remote on the table between herself and Eric's chair. Her posture was flawless, nailed to a bored. But to study her eyes, one might be surprised to see a spark of flint behind her wall of stoicism. She tightened her cheek when she turned to her friend.

"I need several helpings of water." She reported with just the slightest tremble in her throat.

Eric had always been confused about the odd quirks and the ever so present on and off buttons that always accompanied a conversation with Cameron. But for the first time it seemed that there was something genuine, something shakable inside her that the movie had brought out ever so slightly. "Yeah …" He frowned. "You know where it's at." He nodded.

"I do." She confirmed.

The girl's voice was still steady, though her replies had become shorter. There was a graceful glide to the skirt of her white dress as she strode out of the room, her black knee high boots making no sound on the stiff carpets.

Eric watched her go, puzzled and yet oddly saddened in her presence. He turned from the retreating beauty to the screen. There his gaze was held by the still picture of a love sickened, lonesome girl, accompanied by her only friend as she sobbed over the destruction of all she longed for.

* * *

From where you are now, you could only see reality. There, standing on the dirty, grimy streets of real life. They're paved with the asphalt and concrete of heart break and loneness you could not avoid. You'd be hard pressed to turn a blind eye to all the suffering and grimness of everyday life. Here every second of the hardship that came from this awful city is open to you. The compromises and consequences of decisions made twenty years ago, a month ago, yesterday. It was all over the faces, the slumped figures in the driver's seats in endless traffic and in the bearded faces sitting in the alleys. Some of them were longing for love, some for money, some working through the grief of trying to accept the everyday in which they chose one over the other. None of them having the option, the cards in the hand for both. Yet, in this town, where the light shined so bright it blinded you, no one is ever sure if either card was shuffled when you sat at the table. The hand lost the moment your bus ticket was punched to this match stick village.

But from the stool at the neon lit glass bar of some over-priced restaurant were the haughty laughter and light conversation over investments in wine countries up north and self-righteous trendy politics echoed you couldn't help but feel it. Somewhere in this chalk white villa, embedded in the hills above everyone, worked the grand illusion that attracted so many like flies to the zapper. From where the young man sat he could see everything from the grand ceiling-to-floor windows. In the glint of emerald eyes there were grids and cross sections that seemed to go on forever on the dark ember horizons of the new hours of today. There was an irresistible beauty, a peaceful quality to the twinkles and winks of the multicolored lights that never slept. They were like stars that had fallen to the ground. From where the young hero sat it was hard to imagine anything was wrong. That below him was an endless utopia of possibilities. That nothing could ever be anything but beautiful in this emerald city of wonder. Forever protected from the wicked witch.

John Connor knew better, he knew what was out there. But as he had glanced around at the cocktail dresses, tight slacks, and strategically unbuttoned shirts that usually populated this place, he wondered if they did? Looking at this illusion of real life every day, every moment up here in the exclusive clubs, and glass eateries, did they know what was down there? Have the few that weren't born to this life style, had they forgotten?

Sometimes he thought they were willfully ignorant of what was out there. Sometimes they trivialized, not remembering what it was like. Offended when those who they claim to want to help ignore them, hate them. They scoff from their castles, mansions, and manors in other countries. Call all of them down there ignorant, not knowing what they need. They are their only friends and know what's best. All the while they all grow ever intoxicated by the illusion from above. Were they continued to believe in a world solely of their own imagination in the glimmer and glamour of their own views of this rotted visage seen as a magical kingdom. John Connor often thought of what would happen if they were cut off from that illusion. If tomorrow their French dishes and leftist Status-quo ideals were taken from them. If they knew what he had been raised to believe, seen firsthand what John had. But he knew the answer to that.

He had, after all, been raised by one of them.

Even now there were times when Sarah Connor quoted the works of some obscure postmodern Italian poet. Some nights she would turn her nose up at the cheap food Derek and John ate by the pound, because it came from the back of a truck. No matter how hard she had tried to convince her family otherwise, Sarah Connor had been born and bred with a silver spoon in her mouth. When John was forced to come to these places working a case, a bloody name on the wall, he'd always see one or two of them. Girls, teenagers mostly, in silky and slinky dresses, sitting alone. Their lipstick or plumper glimmering in the florescent of the bar lights, their soft beautiful features creased in frowns. They were tired of the artificialness of their lives, the fake friends. They all turn to John and fantasize about the boy who looks too much like a Reese to belong in this place. They dream of this handsome rogue taking them away to live a real life, filled with real people who weren't like their mother's friends. Yet, they'd never know how unpleasant and uncaring the real people were, struggling to make a dime for four kids, uninterested in the ideology of an entitled girl acting like she was on a safari.

Most times John would see those girls and he wondered if his mother was the same as them. If Sarah Connor looked at John's father that way in their motel room. A poor little debutant who got all she wished for. He wondered if there were ever times his mother had regretted leaving this world, this grand illusion behind.

While the evening had dragged on, the ambient noise of laughter died. Slowly the crowds of patrons moved on to their homes or some other place to host their nightcaps. Those who were left behind had slowly made their way to the crystal and glass barroom. Later still was when John had arrived. The standards lightening as most of the staff had taken a load off from the day, a scarf and well-worn field coat, technically counting as a coat and tie in their tired eyes.

Inside the golden tinted bar room there were a few hold overs from the evening's business. Down at the end of the bar were a couple of waiters sitting around exchanging the night's stories and gossip. Toward the entrance was an older woman covered in jewelry. Quietly she inhaled the night's last smoke, staring at her aged figure in the reflection of the bar mirror. In her pampered hand, clutched ever closer, an old lover's graduation ring. In the reflection she wondered where the young starlet had gone that used to stare back and reminder that they wanted this life. Closer to the teen was a girl, two or three years older than John. The bronze skinned girl was in a blue form fitting evening dress, accented by crystal earrings and a matching necklace given to her by an old gentlemen suitor. Her slim hands fiddled with the crystal decorations as she watched the youth from the reflection in her emptying glass. She had depression in her glassy eyes, hopeful to find a man tonight that didn't have wrinkles and bony hands. But even with pity, the young man knew she wasn't too keen for a relationship in the morning when he didn't have jewels to give her.

When John closed his eyes he could feel the midnight blues swirling in the joint as the jaunty jazz musicians of earlier retired. They left only a sax player scrounging for tips from the last customers of the night. The sax was sweet and smooth like a fine scotch. But the melody played was like a man who had grown too fond of the liquor when trying to escape an old ache. Jacket tossed aside, collar of a yellow button down ruffled, and tie loosened. His music filled the bar with a sort of melancholy that came in the late hours. A sadness when weary and lonesomeness fed lost memories of past lives and loves. A time of night that made the regrets of years ago play as if only yesterday while you pulled one more time on the bottle.

But as for the young man it all felt numb to him. Nothing in the room, any sound, or croon of a sorrowful note could penetrate the darkness he carried for one more sleepless night. The sadness and trauma inside John Connor went deeper than anything that could be found in the bar. The origin of this stood in memoriam just above the selection of the fine wines. There were cards and notes from friends and co-workers that stood atop of the finest and rarest of flowers in brocades sent by personal assistants from the regulars of the restaurant. All around this memorial was a shrine to a girl that John Connor did not know, and yet dreamt of when he slept at all. Behind a pair of ballet slippers that sat on top of a white veil stood a silver frame of a girl barely out of high school. She had long curtains of dark hair, curled and glistening in the stage lights. She had a hopeful innocence inherent in her caramel eyes, standing in a beautiful costumed blue dress worn by the lead ballerina in the final act of Sleeping Beauty. Melinda Young had no worries in the world in that moment captured in time forever. She had everything to look forward to that night. A big brother who treasured her above most things in his blessed life, a sister in-law who was carrying a niece she already loved. It was a night of magic and hope, and the beautiful ballerina would never know that six months from now she would be brutally murdered in a grimy alley behind the villa. Her final thought being of her yet to be born niece, how much she loved her, taking her to Ballet practice, teaching her how to dance while her music teacher mother sat behind the piano. But most of all, why, oh why did they name her Alison?

What was real and what the darkened youth had made up in his own mind he wasn't sure of anymore. But John Connor imagined what he had hoped, that she was happy.

"_I'm a machine … I can't be happy." _

He bowed his head into a palm. He couldn't tell them apart from his head and his blackening heart. He saw her in his dreams. The girl and the cyborg had become the amalgamation of the two in his tortured mind. Melinda young felled with a mechanical eye as she lay naked on a cold metal slab. Her perfect flesh cut open, a grotesque corpse filled with the mechanical and the internal organs of a healthy girl. Her emotionless caramel eye shedding a tear for all he could've said to her that she will never hear. The visions of her, of the two of them, turned fear to rage, and rage to hatred inside him. It wasn't just the murder, it was the looming threat. When he ate, when he drank, when he looked to the glimmering city below, he knew there was a killer out there. That somewhere out there a man, a machine … a monster, was working to make everything that haunts his every breath, every synapse, reality. His hatred and his fear dominated his entire being, rotting him from the inside. The great terror of his subconscious always lingered on losing her.

He scoffed darkly on his musings. "Losing her" he muttered into his raised fist, rubbing it against his nose. He thought of her every day, he lived for the sight of her, to smell her lotion when he entered their bathroom. To feel her damp shower towel she lays out at the foot of their tub so he wouldn't slip on the condensation. He cherished all these small moments, everything that he felt in his soul that came to mind when he thought of the word home. Yet, she didn't know how he felt. Forever he lived in the agony of silence, scared of what it all meant to feel this way about something not human. Scared of the shame in the eyes of his mother for the way he looked at his protector, the way they looked at one another. There was never a wasted catch of a meaningful gaze, a casual exchange of attention. Each meeting of the eyes, even the most inconsequence conversation, nothing between the two was wasted, and anyone could see it, feel it between them. For years he spent analyzing, rationalizing, and even ignoring it. Let all the years of doubt and shame forge chains that wrapped around him, holding him back. But being here, seeing what he had in that morgue, it bared him without thought, even with all the heavy links weighing on him, ever toward her with the strength of impossible longing for a killer with the softest of rare smiles.

So it was that a strange madness had taken him, led him, with all the conflict and longing inside him, out into the darkest of frigid nights. With so much on his mind, so much doubt and fear. He could only think of her and a lonely future sitting at a bar, holding a graduation ring, and brooding into the night on all the things that weren't said. They all may die for him, all the people he couldn't get too, couldn't save in time. For weeks he had sought and fought till it nearly turned him rabid. All of it to make sure his protector wouldn't be one of the bodies that made up the foundation of the Legend of John Connor. But now the trail had gone cold, and he didn't know where to look anymore. An hour ago, the not knowing, it could've driven him to madness, into a black rage. But as the world slept and the new day began in earnest, all he could think to do was to return to where it all began …

And think of her.

Out of the back exit of the restaurant beyond a brick wall was a small parking lot that was not even partially filled. He stood alone staring out at the twinkling lights the blinked in rhythm with the insect sounds of the night. The last song of the sax ended before last call, bringing a quiet calm to the surroundings of nature around the youth. For a long time he stared at the collections of dumpsters that stood off to the side. There was a chalk outline and old crime scene tapes around the area were Melinda Young had been found. He bowed his head in sight of it. Driven by all the things that rushed through his mind he took ahold of a cold chrome object in his coat and placed it to his head. His finger slipped on a button which he pressed. It was hard, but everything running through his head carried him onward with the decision.

When the other line on his phone picked up, it was automatic. Three distinct beeps of a coded response that secured her line. It was muscle memory now, hearing it, knowing it. He himself pushed each button without much thought. When he was done there was a long pause from the other line. She didn't say hello, didn't question who. Sometimes this happened between them, a phone call in the middle of the night, no words, no breathing. Just an open line to a silence that said everything with nothing but the implication of the want and longing in the action alone.

John placed his head on the frigid brick, closing his eyes. "Hold it closer … tell him … tell him you need to get something. And if not than just pretend it's just you and me alone." He spoke in a voice possessed by a gravely tone of deep sorrow. John knew where she was, and it wasn't home. Every night he ended his hours of pacing and pouring over maps with a trip to the library. He never went in, never told her he was there. Every night he'd stand outside with Sarah's binoculars and watch her. At first it was to make sure she was okay, that nothing would slink from the shadows to find her alone out in the middle of the city under the cover of night. But now John did it just to watch her, to memorize each private smile she guarded, to know each curve on her body. He would fill himself with her quietly, never forgetting why he had to stop the monster.

She didn't speak, but he heard the obedient brush of glossy hair against the ear piece. "I've got a problem here." He said with a long sigh, his breath visible in the cold. "You're in trouble … and I've tried to keep it from you. I know I shouldn't have … mom, she does that to me all the time and I hate it. But coming face to face with what's out there, what it does … I get it now, why she does it. You and me, we'd go after it, the danger, rather than risk the people we … we _care_ for." He paused at a simple word to anyone else and rephrased it. There was still no response from the other line, but he could feel her, he didn't know how, but he could.

"When I set out to beat this thing I thought I knew what I was doing, that it was run of the mill. But now I don't think that. I lost the trail …" His voice sputtered. "And I don't know what I'm going to do." He took the phone away from his ear and placed it on his shoulder. He let out three harsh breaths into the morning air to compose himself. When he returned he wasn't questioned where he had went. "I'm scared, more than usual, and I've been scared before … I guess I've always been scared you know?" He his voice sputtered. "I've been scared of the future, scared of machines … scared of tomorrow." He mirthlessly breathed a chuckle. "But this is different. Because, it's going to hurt these next couple of years … I don't want to lose Derek and I don't know what I'd do without mom. But I always thought …" He bit his lip. "I always thought that if I had to live through it. If worse comes to worse I'd live through it …"a single tear fell from his cheek.

"Because I would have you with me." He turned away from the brick wall and looked out over the city scape framed by branches of the wilderness around him. "But now …" he shook his head. "I, I'm scared of failing you, the way I have everyone else. I'm more scared than I've ever been in my life, because I need you." He closed his eyes again.

"When I think of losing you … All I can see is all the happy moments we've shared and the little things that we do for each other every day that no one would notice but you and me. They mix up and crowd around me. Then I feel how all of it would be lost to ashes and fading memories in the years ahead of me without you. How hard it is to imagine giving it all up, to give you up to a future by myself. I'm scared, Cameron, scared because I don't think I can live without you." He shook his head. "And I think of all the years that we've wasted staring at conjoining doors, sharing moments in the private of truck cabs, not wanting to say anything, not knowing what to say to all of the things that we feel, that can't be put into words. But I can't live through another night of not knowing, of tonight might being the last night, and I would've spent it tearing myself up, and being satisfied with just having those small moments to look back on and calling it friendship, knowing it was so much more. If I lose you, if I lose myself, all I've ever wanted you to know is how much _I love you_." He paused with a gasp of a dying man who had been crushed till the final reprieve, feeling the last of life in freedom of the release of all the agony.

"From the first time we met, to the moment I saw you in that truck. I've loved you with no distinction of who and what you are. And I've tried to rationalize it, tried to ignore it, I've tried laying down punishment for this damn thing between us that won't go away by depriving myself of you. But no matter how far I run or lock myself away, I can't get away from how much of a part of me you've become. I wasn't sure if I could say this to your face, and I know this makes me a coward. But if I saw you standing in front of me tonight, I'm not sure I could get a word out without ripping this beating thing in my chest and giving it to you as a gesture of all I've felt since Red Valley. You don't have to say anything, you don't even have to like it. But if this thing kills me tomorrow, I just wanted you to know that I couldn't live another second without you. That despite what had been said by any other me in any other future, I've never been the lonely kid that everyone thought I was … I've always just been waiting for you."

There was no response on the other line, no one to confirm or deny the words he had spoken. He felt drained and light headed as he absorbed the silence of all that had finally been spoken. From behind him the door to the villa swung open and the last of the night's patrons called it quits. He heard the clacks of shoes and high heels on the pavement as shadowy figures passed him on their way to their cars and cabs waiting.

"Cameron?" He said into the phone. But he received no answer from the other line. He may have said otherwise but he hung off of the silence, waiting or hoping for anything she might say about his emotions. Even if it was something harsh, a rejection of all the human sentimentality of his words … it would be better than the silence she fed him. "Cameron …" He begged with closed eyes, hand placed on the phone like it was a glass separator.

From the moving crowd one figure halted in front of him as the others passed quietly into the darkness. It stood watching the silhouette that slumped wearily against the wall. John hadn't noticed it at first, but after a moment his senses kicked in. He might have been flooded with emotion, but the old training was like muscle memory. He opened his eyes and tensed for a moment till he got a good look.

Her posture was stiff as a board, straight and purposeful to a fault. In the cold wind her glossy chocolate tresses surrendered a few straightened strands to be moved out of place. She wore a familiar purple motorcycle waist jacket that covered a pure white linen dress that floated around her knees. Her caramel eyes seemed stoic and unreadable as she stood in front of John with her cellphone open and touching her ear.

He seemed shocked and speechless while both teens stood in front of one another. Their cellphones were still at their ears. There was a long pause between the two, before the cyborg slowly began to lower her phone, snapping it shut. The boy watched the girl pocket the phone inside her beloved jacket, with an almost mechanical grace to her movements. There was a long beat between her return to him and the notice of the idiocy of still having the phone to his ear. He quickly put his phone away, pocketing it in his inner coat.

There was a long pause between the two of them as both did not speak. John could've and in any other circumstance would've asked how she knew where he was. But he didn't need too. There were a million ways that Cameron could've tracked John down. It was also very possible that he wasn't the only one who spent nights following his loved ones around. There were also more important things to address. So many things ran through John's mind in that moment of realization that she was here. He wanted her answers to all of the questions, he wanted to hear what had been on her mind all along. Did she even want to tell him? Was this the beginning of the end for them? Had he ruined a good thing? But somewhere between the rational side of his brain taking over did he realize that it was this kind of thinking that had landed him here. After all he had been through, seen and felt … he just didn't need that voice in his head. He was way passed the need for it now.

But it didn't matter because the only thing Cameron had to do to quell the torrent in John's mind was take one step closer. It was a symbolic gesture. Her foot was a wordless answer to all the things that had swirled between them since the moment they met so many timelines ago across vast multitudes of multiverses that were aflame even as they conquered impossibility.

So it was when she took her second step, she found herself walking into his arms.

John grabbed ahold of the girl and didn't let go. He crushed her to his chest, his arms wrapping around her ribs, blanketing her with himself. The girl was like oxygen to a drowning man, a trauma blanket after surviving an inferno. He smelt her, felt her, rubbed her against him. The hero couldn't help but want to possess the Cyborg, for the beautiful girl to physically be a part of him. He placed his hands on the back of Cameron's head letting her silky strands rub against his callouses. There was no part of the girl that didn't bring some comfort to the young man. The cyborg who had suddenly been ambushed by a rash of affection, wrapper her arms around John's neck accepting this deluge of contact without protest, quietly absorbing all of it with puzzled eyes that moment by moment were filled with a satisfaction that only every few machines experienced for only a split second. Cameron was filled with a feeling that her mission was complete, that her purpose in life had been found and filled. But when she didn't shut down, or go into standby she became confused.

Her arms slid from John's neck, her hands capturing both of his stubbled cheeks. She halted the pleasurable feeling of his cheek rubbed against hers as he held her so close in his embrace. Green eyes were confused as the cyborg stood deeply embraced in John's arms. Her golden eyes searched his with a frown.

"What? What is it?" John asked breathlessly.

"I … I don't know." She blinked. "I, I have this sensation." She explained. "When you hold me it feels like my mission, it's complete." She looked down at the embrace. "But I continue to function." She explained. "I live with this feeling, it maintains." She tilted her head.

John frowned. "How do you quantify this experience?" He asked.

The girl continued to hold the boy's face in her hands gently. "Every machine is made with a purpose. We all live to complete it, and only to complete it. For the split second in which we are allowed to experience that achievement it's the closest to what you might perceive as happiness before we become useless. I myself had a purpose, once it was to kill you, then to protect you. Now I've found this achievement that I never had with either programing. I don't know what to make of it, but it's a feeling that I …" She paused in a loss of words.

"A feeling you don't want to give up." He confirmed with emerald eyes of passion and deep affection. The girl simply shook her head in confirmation at his insight. He nodded and smoothed her hair behind her ear, a thumb rubbing against her cheekbone. "I feel it too." He placed his forehead against hers.

"What is it?" She asked with a whispered curiosity.

John smirked and leaned forward, whispering one word in her ear. When he returned, her eyes widened as she looked to him. "Is it?" She asked.

His hand smoothed her cheek, cupping it gently. "You tell me." He slowly began to bring his lips to hers. She watched him with a look of anticipation and wonder at what would happen when they finally cemented this new state of enlightenment she had found in John's arms.

It started with the shift of the wind. The first thing that was noticed was the smell. It was a putrid, ugly scent of dried blood, old dumpsters, and dead things. Next, it was the sound from above. The night disturbed by the rustled clinking and shifting of the tile decorations from the roof of the villa. It had been covered from the lover's notice by the creaking and cracking of the trees in the salty California breeze. Finally, it was the massive shadow that had leapt from above. The big silhouette saw, smelt his old nightmare, his hated enemy who he thought he had killed already.

The shadow landed with a loud thump on the gravel floor just on the other side of the paved walk way. His red eyes glowed in the back lights of the restaurant, his gaze drawn to the star-crossed lovers against the brick wall across the cement sidewalk. Incensed into an animalistic rage by the perfumed smell of all that he hated, the beast charged forward.

John heard the blood chilling animalistic roar, only after Cameron had turned from his advancing lips. He watched as a stinking, disease festering hand ripped across Cameron's cheek. Her artificial blood spurted from her mouth in a ribbon of hot liquid onto the youth's face. The blow from the powerful hand sent both intertwined teens sailing down the ramped walkway to the entrance of the graveled parking lot. They rolled over one another to the feet of the manager's BMW, halting in a slush of small rocks.

John had little time to catch his baring, having been rolled up on by a machine as heavy as a fat kid on an offensive line. He shook his head as Cameron's wounds trickled blood from her nose and mouth onto his jacket's shoulder. The girl lying on top of him now lifted her head. What were such hopeful eyes moments ago, now had a cold and intense deadliness to them as they met his from above. There was no time for recovery when a thick muscular hand violently snatched Cameron by the tresses of her long glossy hair. John watched helplessly as it dragged her off the dazed boy and into the parking lot. The hero rolled on his side to his feet trying to get the air back into his lungs.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

GRRRROOOOORRRROOORRRR!

A rage filled roar echoed into the night. In the shadows the tall pale beast on two legs began slamming the cyborg's head against the hood of the silver BMW. The vicious violence of the action was carried by an animalistic barbarism as he mercilessly attacked the petite ballerina. Her servos whining and clicking in protest as each powerful smash turned on and off an azure glow within her golden eyes. Her blood grinding and smearing on the expensive car's paint job.

Suddenly there was a human cry of aggression that cut through the night. John leapt onto the monster's back, forcing his forearm under the beast's snout and around the airway. With a mighty roar, the hunched figure began violently spinning, its thick hand snapping back at the boy. Meanwhile the cyborg girl remained bent over the hood of the manager's car, rebooting while the beast and John grappled.

The hero slipped and slid on the monster's back, feeling the clumped and filth caked matted hair rub against his long sleeve shirt and field jacket. He strained and strained trying savagely to crush the beast's windpipe as it howled and snarled. John had made progress, feeling the beast weaken in his iron grip. When suddenly the powerful savage slammed him back first into the side of the BMW. Weakened by the crushing blow, the large hand of the beast grabbed him by his up turned collar and flipped him over the shoulder. John landed with a loud denting crash on the hood of a late model Pontiac that belonged to one unlucky cook. The hero made a high pitched gag of the strain on his back which he arched in pain. Advancing with the desperate rush of four heavy limbs on gravel, a tall, massive shadow loomed over the young man. He could smell the garbage on its breath and the fresh soil on its fists as it moved to put a new hole in John's face. He moved his head back and forth each blow putting new dents in the blue Firebird.

With nowhere to go for the last blow, the large beast, with the glimmering red eyes, put its fist in a palm and was ready to finish John with both of them. But mid hammer, two slim hands stopped the momentum in an impossible show of strength. Cameron held the large combined fist in check as she slid back first on top of John's chest protectively. He could hear her servos protesting at the weight. Adjusting, the cyborg lifted a slim leg and forced a black knee high boot into the pooched red belly of the monster. It went skittering over gravel with a hiss. Arching from her lover's chest, the girl thrust forward with a flying haymaker that hit the monster square in the face. The blow sent its lower jaw one way and the fangs another. The beast went flying through the air, landing with a crunch against a driver's side window and a clouded slush in between two other cars. Without wasted time or movements, the machine slid off John and to her feet. She advanced menacingly to engage with the reeling beast.

Cameron turned the corner between a damaged Buick and Mercedes to find her target suddenly missing. She searched the narrow path between cars, switching to infrared as she looked over roofs. But as she traveled further down toward a second row, two giant hands from underneath the Lexis grabbed the girl's ankles and dragged her under the white car. Now that it had the girl on her back, the beast fell on her with all its weight. Saliva and snot dripped off the beast's yellow fangs and onto Cameron's chest as the cyborg held her hands out, holding the snapping jaws of the rabid aggressor at bay, while allowing its large powerful fists to beat her taunt belly and soft breasts savagely. Suddenly a dashing figure slid across the hood of the Lexis, behind the monster. A glittering sharp object was held firmly in his hand.

John slashed the sharpened combat knife across the beast's back. With a mighty roar, it ripped away from the pinned cyborg and began swinging savagely at the boy who drew it away from the girl he loved. In his hand, John expertly twirled a knife that had once carved **"No Fate"** into a Mexican picnic table many years ago. He jerked back at the large monster's first swing, letting it wave by. But on the second attempted open palmed slap he parried hard with a stab, impaling the beasts palm with the knife. It roared in anger as John quickly unstuck his weapon and lunged forward with a slash that rung true across the beast's open chest. The result was an explosion of blood that followed a clumped piece of flesh topped with a red nipple landing on the graveled floor.

Driven into a berserker like rage, the beast struck John full in the chest with a flailing arm that hit like a club. The boy flew across the hood, opposite the way he came, landing back first against a familiar blue Jeep Liberty.

Now mind focused on one thing and one thing only. The large brutal figure moved to press its counter attack, fueled by a great pain of cut nerve endings. He was stopped however by a petite hand that snatched it by the nape of the neck. A small fist began striking crippling blows to the exposed ribs and kidneys of her opponent. Filled with pain of blows of equal strength, the monster was filled a rush of adrenaline. It contorted itself as could beasts of its ancestry, twisting the machines firm grip off hit's hairy neck. With a roar it slammed her back first into the hood of the Mercedes. With a bloody hand forcing the girl down the other pounding on her armored chest. The beast savagely bit into the flesh of her smooth neck with its yellow fangs. Cameron let out a gasp as the savage animal tore out her throat with a rip of its head. With pieces of her skin still hanging from the filth covered mouth, it pressed on, sinking the bloody teeth into the bare skin of her chest as if feasting on her supple flesh.

BOOM!

SHEEK! SHEEK!

BOOM!

The force of a twelve gage ripped the beast off the cyborg. Despite an entire flank missing from it's side, the monster still charged at John Connor. Armed with Sarah's tactical Remington he fired one more shot right into the chest of the charging savage. The force of the pellet spread flung the animal right into the side of the Buick. The impact neatly tipped over the car when it was hit with the full dead weight of the beast. Blood coated the side the expensive vehicle, its golden polish could still be made out through the gaping hole in the gigantic monster's chest.

With a long visible sigh in the cold night, John lowered the smoking barrel. Despite her horribly bruised and blood soaked appearance of a murder victim, the girl seemed to be much steadier on her feet. She caught a stumbling John in her arms attempting to rush to _her_ aide. "Are you alright?" He asked. His green eyes were horror struck to see gruesome wounds coded in the foul, yellowish, saliva where her neck and cleavage used to be.

"Better than you." She replied. Her voice was predictably unaffected by a ripped out throat. At her response John just scoffed breathlessly and shook his head, looking her over gratefully. Gently she reached out and cupped his bruised cheek, her touch calming the coursing blood of the fight still hot in John's veins. Though he was racked with a sore pain all over his upper body and Cameron sticky in blood, he still pulled her into a tight embrace of relief.

It was over.

Cameron was first to brake it as she turned down the road. "The Manager called the police." She replied. Though John shared her view and yet couldn't hear anything, he didn't doubt her story. The boy took a moment looming over the beast's corpse to salute a fallen foe that had threatened so much of what he cared for in this world. Despite John moving away, Cameron lingered watching his wad of spit run down the beast's snout. She alone took a beat to study their foe in confusion. The light wasn't good enough for John to see all that lay before him. Her eyes suddenly lightened in familiarity with what and who she was standing vigil over. Privately, behind her stoic cyborg walls there was just a flicker of a deep shame when looking into blank red eyes. She thought to herself that he almost seemed innocent in death as he was when she first met him.

John returned, holding the shotgun in one hand and taking Cameron's with his other. "Cameron, Come on!" Their hands were intertwined as they fled the scene together.

When the headlights of the Jeep flashed over the parking lot it had shown a natural spotlight on the dead beast that sat slumped against the side of a luxury car. In the light, the red eyes almost gleamed to life one last time before the bloody body of an _albino gorilla_ was left in the darkness when the vehicle tore into the night.


	6. Alude Lang Syne

There was a cascade of shadows that appeared against the walls wherever the flickering light of lamp fixtures appeared on the abandoned, grimy city street. A flurry of snow was carried on the gentle breeze. As soft and chilling as the feather light touches of a mistress's fingers, cruel and scheming next to her married lover in the darkest of the ink black night. The frozen precipitation had become a nightly occurrence, a change in weather patterns. The cycle mutated in the wake of radiation within the atmosphere, slowly dissipating but like the unruly tenant, never leaving it the way it had been. The snow fell without pause, but without much collection as it gathered in filmy piles in corners and nooks of obscure alleyways. It accumulated at the tops of sparling deco towers that had all been abandoned before the war had even begun, and in dusty and cobwebbed commuter stations. There under the arched and brittle domes of glass, rusted and hollowed out commuter trolleys sat on their broken tracks. Adjacent to the boarding platform, they forever waited for passengers that would never come.

There was a feeling of a haunted otherworldliness to this area of the city. It remained untouched by fighting and warfare, even untouched by society itself before Judgment day. In most other cities this part of the past, this unwanted sketch of history, unkept and uncared for, would have been buried by progress. It should have been a forgotten place only seen below sewer, surrounded by the festering moats of human waste underneath the subway lines. But in this town, like her people, there was no such thing as covering up the past. Like a debauched and exposed starlet, or a fly-by success, the world seemed to turn their backs on the old city. Forgotten were her painted murals of war bond sales, and Chinese Laundromats on the sides of buildings. Ignored were the decrepit and acid defaced angels on the thirteenth floors of her khaki and white stone architecture. Its lonesome ruins of neglect silhouetted against bald mountain faces that carried a mossy and mold covered sign that said only "HOLLY" upon it.

The people who remained within the city, the denizens of the ruins, preferred that to which they knew, rather than to venture into this part of town. For there was a feeling one gets when traveling the intact, but garbage strewn streets of the old city. It was an unease that you were being watched, being haunted by something neither human nor machine. Essences and histories spewing from the sludge stained asphalt and moldy mortar of the brick. All of it coagulating into a spirit, a soul. But not a beautiful soul, not the girl on some glamorous magazine covers associated with the glint of what once was. She was the forgotten, the aged hag, filled with jealously and bitterness of the slow decay of time and the absence of want. She was a slighted figure that permanated the atmosphere that possessed each stone and angel turned hideous gargoyle above. Neglect had turned to incurable madness, and with each hissing and ghostly wail through broken glass and ramshackled metal shutter on this very witching hour of midnight, she whispered dark promises to those who dared to trespass on this section of unknown and ancient history. Promises only heard to those who felt her sitting on their chest as she robbed them of their last breath of God's most sacred gift.

It was in this time of night that one's mind plays such horrible tricks. There was a flicker of a shadow here, the croon of a voice calling to you from some dark unknown outside the window. The lamp post, a dilapidated sign, in the anxiety of a tired and flayed mind it all created images of something fearsome, something deadly come to claim you at your most vulnerable. It was the "could be", the "almost", that tortured those who had jobs to do in the dead of these frigid nights. It was not the ignorance of the made-believe that plagued small children that haunted these men and women, it was something worse. They grew to know the real horrors that lived outside the auto shop doors and windows. They knew of the festering and horrible things that fled to the deepest and darkest parts of forgotten tunnels, waiting for the cover of darkness to come and find them. They all remember that not so distant past and the terrors that found their way to the surface to play under the covered haze of the slick white streets of this ruined world.

For hours the girl sat at the window staring out at the tall building, towering into the sky. She had never seen anything like it before, had never been in a place quiet like this. Wherever she had gone there were always ruins —grounded cinder block, rebar, rusted metal— this was her world. But this place, this intact mash up of unknown and unseen wonder of architecture, filled with cracked streets of faded pictures and words on colorful signs … it was like something out of the stories she had heard as a child. The old city was like a magical place in the daylight. But now in the night, she felt something wrong, something uncomfortable. She was like a rat drawn to the corner of a tunnel, caught in a metal cup. Now the girl, covered in tunnel filth, could do was wait for someone to beat her head till she was dead, and hold her over a cook fire.

She wished she was brave enough to say something about what was troubling her. Usually when she talked no one wanted to hear what she had to say. They called her slut, called her stinky … ass fuck. If Jesse was there, she'd listen to her. She had been teaching her all sorts of stuff about letters, words, and numbers. She was supposed to be practicing her numbers by counting the gargoyles that were on the ledge of the adjacent building. The problem was that an hour ago there were eight creatures sitting on the thirteenth floor of the tall building. But now there were nine. The newest one seemed out of place, crouched and watching their shop, not the skyline like its companions. That was fifteen minutes ago, now the ninth gargoyle had disappeared again after she went to consult her child's counting book. Jesse had told her that she was supposed to inform anyone if she saw anything out of the ordinary.

"Listen you little cum guzzler, there ain't nobody out there." The withered woman sighed abrasively to the dirty girl. She was strong, muscular, covered in urban tattoos, and sported a shaved head. The former sergeant of the USS Jimmy Carter Marine detachment wasn't particularly friendly to the teen. She had once had her own command of good men and woman. The best sailors anyone could ever ask for. But now one sunken submarine later and she was reduced to guarding the dusty and cobwebbed reception area of a garage. All the others were inside the shop having fun with their _prize_ and she was out here, babysitting the little prostitute. She might have even made her own fun, treating herself to a little sample tasting of Jesse's "Connor Custer", but it would've been more sanitary to eat out a hole in the Griffith Park sod then to stick her tongue in the filthy girl's cooch.

The dirty teen frowned. "But there were eight gargoyles and now there are nine, see, nine." The dirty girl picked up the child's book and shoved it in the Marine's face. Her pale fingers flipped the page back and forth, between the eight and nine page.

The woman snatched the book out of the girl's hand. "Get that shit outta here!" She took the book and drop kicked it to the other side of the dusty office. A stack of yellowed invoice notices and aged accounting books fell over when it landed. The girl made a petulant sound of protest at the action. Turning around she went to chase it when the woman slid down in the chair and shoved a boot in the girl's rear. The force sent her stumbling forward. Without balance, the teen went sliding across the dark wood receptionist's desk, taking with her stacks of ordered parts, and power tool inventory. There was a loud clatter as she disappeared behind the desk.

"At least someone is having fun."

Another former sailor entered the room. The man was tall, lanky, and consistent with what was expected of the normal malnutrition diet of a survivor of an apocalypse. Though despite his lack of weight there was still a wiry spirit within the Australian's step. His shaggy, dark locks were dampened, and his bearded cheek darkened with oil smudges.

The woman sneered. "Oh yeah, me and the honey trap are just having loads of laughs out here." She snorted in disdain. In the background the dirty girl had collected her book, hugging it to her chest. Her crystal eyes hurt. The oil slicked man had a light of sympathy for the girl.

"Come on, Rodriguez, you know Jesse ain't gonna like you messing with her." He warned pulling off workmen's gloves.

"Fuck Flores …" She sighed with disrespect, lounging back in the squeaky office chair. "She's got all of these plans, Hayley. Sure, alright … But do you really think that we're all apart of them? Look at all the shit we're doing. And for what, man?" She put her hands behind her head.

The sudden treasonous talk and dissatisfaction lit the fire of anger in the other Marine. If Flores was right, then they'd all escape this nightmare forever. But as long as there was someone to complain, someone not on the same team, they might just fall apart before they passed those pearly gates to an ozone and people contaminated heaven again. This was why the man suddenly shoved the sergeant's feet off the desk.

The chair rattled as she was forced to sit up straight. "Fuck you, Rodriguez …" he spat at the woman. "You haven't done jack shit since we hung that _metal lover_. We've been in there all night working on the salvage and all you've done is kick around a little tramp and complain!" he shouted, pointing to a door in a narrow hallway flanked by stacks and stacks of old unused tires.

Suddenly the woman shot out of her seat. Pride, a young life in the barrio, and another in rubble met this challenge with aggressive force. She grabbed the thin man by the shirt in her iron clad grip. "You think I'm not pulling my weight?" She asked through intimidating, yellow, clenched teeth as she lifted the exhausted man off the ground. "I could pull three times your weight and more, you funny talking, tooth pick, bitch!" She shook him angrily.

Then all at once there was the sound of draining power as the lamps that illuminated the office slowly dimmed till the entire area was covered in darkness. Only the glow of the night, and an ancient Serrano Point powered street light shed visibility in the dark, contained space. Everything in the office went dead quiet all the sudden. Both combating Marines stopped fighting and listened, waiting for what came next.

"See, I told you there was someone …" The girl shrieked in fright across the room.

The woman threw an accountant's book at the girl. "Shut the fuck up!" Her urban twisted Spanish accent hissed as the book made contact with the girl's chest.

They could hear her in the long howl of the gusty snow drifts tapping against the ancient window panes. Feel her in the drafts that spilled from the cracks in the front doors. They had trespassed to commit dark deeds without paying the toll. The woman had ignored it, the Australian had tried, but the girl knew. They could all hear the hushed breath, the tickle against the ear as the crone whispered her dark secrets to them. It was all summed up in a word …

Death.

"Gotta be the breaker right?" The woman asked her comrade. He could hear the tremble of her voice as she spoke. There was just the slightest show of fear at the sudden turn of events. Anxiety artificially aged the man's face as he nodded rapidly in conformation. The sergeant nodded back, dropping him like a bag of potatoes. "Stay here, I'll go check it out." She leapt at the chance to get out, even in this weather and part of town. A fight of any kind would suit her rather than be cooped up with the unwashed urchin and the spineless foreigner. Slipping on her Australian surplus long coat, she picked up the 30 watt plasma rifle off the floor under the cluttered desk.

The front door opened with a squeal and a bang as it clamped shut. Out into the night the wind was swirling. It assaulted the large woman's nose and cheeks with the frigid chill and icy precipitation that felt like sandpaper on the raw skin of her face. The atmosphere roared with commotion as the breeze picked up debris and trash rustling it in cyclones all around the sidewalks and alleyways that surrounded the auto shop. The world had come alive around her, pointing her rifle back and forth at all the little things that jumped in and out of her sight. It felt like ghosts gnawing and gashing at her, hundreds of lost souls of generations past beating their chest, stomping their feet, and psyching themselves up for battle as the weather worsened. She was on edge, caught in a sudden ambush of fear, and surrounded by adversaries that weren't really there and yet were all too real in the corner of her eye. It was a change in the weather, the shifting of the wind, nothing more but a guilty conscious on a bleak evening. That was what she had tried to convince herself, when in fact she wasn't alone out there.

By the time she heard the running crunch of double grip treads on the slick sidewalk it was too late. Emerging from shadows of an abandoned alley, a tall cowled silhouette sprang forward in attack. The Tech-Com Marine didn't have a chance. The opening salvo was a right rib shot that had her keeled, while a flat hand jabbed at the nerve bundle in her deltoid with finger tips in both front and back of her shoulder, causing the rifle in her hand to fall to the grimy floor. Unable to move her right arm, the avenger pressed his merciless assault with a strategically surgical barrage of lightening punches. Her face jittered from side to side with each blow taking something. A strike above both eyes took her sight, with the nose came her smell and her ability to call out. With each blow she gave ground and more ground trying to get away. Her mind and reflexes numbed from the pained haze that clouded in concussion. Backed up to the wall, the tall figure with the deadly accurate fists stuck her diaphragm with a powerful heel kick. As weak and unresponsive as a practice dummy, the shaved sergeant went backward.

**CRISH!**

The brittle glass collapsed into a thousand pieces of dull shavings on the wooden floor of the old garage. The loud noise caused the other sailor and the dirty girl to startle finding the beefy woman who could bench press both of them draped over what was left of the storefront window. Seeing the silhouette of the shadow leaping through, the shaggy Australian went for the side arm on top of a filing cabinet. As the man drew his gun, the shadow bent his wrist downward and jerked his arm forward. From inside his coat sleeve the buzz of a wrist gadget produced a four pointed throwing star.

_CRACK!_

The Australian fired his sidearm at the cowled avenging figure. But the misjudgment of distance from the submariner and a tight running back's spin at the right moment caused the sailor's shot to go wide. Coming out of his spin, the intruder let fly his throwing star like a discus thrower at a track meet. The sound of something deadly and sharp spun distinctively through the deadly space. The last feeling the marine had in his right hand was his finger still holding down the trigger. Then the gun and hand with it was severed at the wrist in spray of arcing blood.

_CRACK, CRACK, CRACK!_

Dropping to a knee, the Marine's adversary drew a nicked and scarred Colt from his back hip holster and fired. Three puffs of blood exploded from the man's chest as .45 caliber bullets impacted with heavy thuds. The man shook with each impact, falling with a heavy thump right in front of the filthy blond who was finding under the desk. Her big crystal eyes grew two sizes as she watched the sailor turn in his dying moments and stare at his severed hand lying at the mouth of the narrow hallway. Blood pooled from the wounds in his chest and from his stumped arm collecting in a small lake at her feet.

She had lived in this world too long to know what would happen next if she didn't do something. Quickly, she sprung out of her hole, crawling through the sticky hot liquid that smelled so heavy with iron that it had her sick. She huffed and puffed desperately, slipping and sliding through the messy liquid, trying to reach the pistol still clutched firmly in the severed hand's fingers. She sobbed audibly, making effort filled squeals as she got closer and closer. Her pale finger tips could feel the hair on the severed hand as she reached for it.

_**CRICK**_

A grimy boot casually crushed the girl's knuckles with a sickening crunch like the snapping of dry pasta noodles. She withdrew her hand to her ample chest, cradling it as she wiggled in soundless pain on top of the dead body. Cold and intruding fingers embedded themselves in the girl's neck while the padded gauntlet chaffed her smooth, soot covered skin. The teen was lifted off the stiff body smelling of released bowels and iron with one hand and slammed on the office desk.

She lay flat, now face to face with a hooded and covered figure. His face was cowled by shadows, and his nose and mouth hidden by a blue scarf. A bandoleer was buckled across his chest that was covered by a worn, double-breasted leather coat the color of aged mahogany. But it was the eyes that she was terrified to look into. They were hardened, deadly, and fierce beyond any reason. The girl would live to see the same eyes one last time. In a house many years ago, as she holds ice cream and flirts with the future owner. Those eyes would turn the corner when returning to the new home and finding the girl with a look as if she belonged anywhere else but in their new house. She would make a joke to hide the fact that she had nearly lost control of her bladder, remembering this very night.

A cruel hand gripped the dirty girl's chin, between his thumb and index finger, forcing her head against the wooden desk. He put his Colt between her eyes and drew the click of his trigger with murder in his blue flecked emerald orbs.

"How many?"

* * *

The dingy locker room smelled of oil and dirty jumpsuits, giving it a strong odious tang that polluted the air. Sixty years of disuse and a loitering laundry cart full of soiled clothing had made the dusty room almost toxic. The perfume of the old place gave off a strange scent that welled in ones throat. Whatever the woman inside was going to eat tomorrow it would most likely taste like the locker room.

She knew she was just whining about something she had a hand in herself. There was no one saying that she couldn't leave, or that she had to go inside the smelly room. But she entered to act out a fantasy that she just couldn't let go, a private moment she wanted to herself. In the only mirror in the garage locker room where jumpsuits and oil stained caps still hung inside dusty lockers, she watched her reflection. A torn and threadbare white skirt twirled at the behest of her hand. The wedding dress was tailored from a silky parachute canopy and sown rather skin tight by someone who spent every night for years working on it, waiting for the day he could claim his lover so she might wear it when he swept her away. He almost lived that dream, but now his most prized item fluttered while his murderer pressed it to her chest in the mirror. It was just the woman's size though she dare not put it on, at least not in front of her men.

Jesse Flores could see what kind of bride she might have made. Derek Reese was a different kind of man than what most of the other guys in Tech-Com were like. He'd want to get married. He still cared for all the romantic things a man was supposed to do for his woman. Even in the world they lived most of their lives in. He was practical most of the time, but when it came to the woman he loved, he do anything for her. There wasn't a man like him anywhere in this world or the one he traveled too. He was a soldier with a conscience, a killer with a heart of gold. He'd spend forever with her, take care of her. They could be happy. So it wouldn't be a big event, maybe not even a moderate event. It would just be Derek, herself, and the preacher as the sun set over some crystal clear white beach. The silky sand between their toes and nothing but blue skies, expensive wine, and rich foods till the world was on fire and not their problem anymore.

But it was a fools dream. Not because it wasn't attainable, but because there was so much more now to the woman's plans. That was heaven, what some other woman wanted: young, naïve, a good and loyal sailor. Now all she could think of was the golden eyed ballerina that told her of all that she lost, of the way Connor cherished her. All that night all she could hear was the fake sympathy in the metal whore's voice, some automated setting. She, no, _it_ had no idea what had been taken from her, no idea, not an inkling. Yet, it thought it had the right to just stand there and pretend, like it knew what it was like to lose an unborn child.

It wasn't just her, _it_. There was something diseased about the whole Resistance in general. They had all forgotten what it was like, what the machines had done, the great crimes the Gray's had committed. They sit around and talk the big talk, joke around like this was all just a game. That degenerate hanging from a tree; he was just the beginning. She had brought up the idea of the orderly disposal of Connor's reprogrammed monsters and High Command wouldn't even hear about it. These monsters that took away her future, they've integrated into their culture, into the accepted norm of society. There was no point in fighting a losing war in the here and now.

If she was going to clean away this diseased culture, she would have to do it where it started. When Connor was young and influenced by the metal witch with the hypnotizing beauty. She saw it when she closed her eyes, saw it in her nightmares, and she used it as fuel as she worked tonight. Each twitch, each innocent flutter of hurt as she gutted and stripped, it almost gave her pleasure thinking it was Connor's little whore.

Suddenly the light in the room buzzed loudly before everything in the locker room went black. For a long beat she waited and listened in the silence that followed. She gave a long agitated sigh as she folded the dress into threes with her forearms. The door slammed open as she strode out.

Outside the locker room was a small darkened office area cluttered with senior mechanics desks where they reported to do paper work and fill out invoices. There the rest of crew was sitting around, most looking up at the florescent lights that were no long working. Cully, a chestnut haired woman, stood at the window with a plasma rifle. Though not a member of the Jimmy Carter, but a soldier introduced to her by Derek, she certainly had become a good friend and a kindred spirit in their cause.

"Breaker's down, Boss." Miller said leaning back in a roller chair, flexing his knee on the side of the desk. She stared at the dark haired Brooklyn born man with angry cat eyes.

"Really?" She sneered sarcastically.

The Asian woman shook her head, pacing deeper into the small office. "I thought I told you not to over use one set of plugs when you insert the power cables for the tools!" Jesse lectured in annoyance, tossing the wedding dress on an unoccupied desk.

Wilkerson spoke up. "There's no one working." The Marine was lying on the floor. He wore a knitted cap, black tank top, and a jump suit pulled down to his waist. Though they were no strangers to black outs since using an old power grid for their salvage work, there was something different in this one. Something prickled at the back of Flores's neck, just like when you knew someone had the drop on you and there was nothing you could do.

But the minute she heard the sharp noise of brittle glass shattering from the store front window and the thunder of pistol fire, she knew that they had been discovered. She would ask how and by whom, but her gut told her she knew the answers to both.

By this time everyone was on their feet all the commotion on the other side of the office door suddenly went quiet. Jesse picked up a plasma rifle and tossed it to Jacks. "Jacks, Miller, Wilkerson go check it out." She ordered. The broadly built Dominican Marine lieutenant with the fade nodded. Jacks motioned the other two to follow him while he tossed a Billy Club to Wilkerson and stuffed one in his belt for himself. The native New Yorker took a knife in hand, bringing up the rear.

The three Marines exited the office and into the narrow corridor lined with tall stacks of black tires. The entire reception area was darkened and covered by shadows perpetuated by the corner street light. Its flickering golden light glimmered unreliably through the now shattered storefront windows. The cluttered front of the shop was frigid and already dampening with snow flurries being directed inside with impunity from the gusty night.

Their sight was immediately drawn to the floor where the street light outside created an almost natural spotlight to the bottom of the desk. Lying in a puddle of drying blood was the same dirty teen that was so integral to Jesse's plans. She had been stripped naked. Her body was covered a layer of filth that almost camouflaged her to the wooden floor. Dirty ample breasts jiggled as she bucked and struggled against the handcuffs that stretched her arms above her head, looped around the leg stand of the heavy desk. Her warning voice muffled to them, as a handkerchief was wadded in her mouth. With a flicker of humanity within dark eyes, Jacks placed his rifle on the top of the nearest tire stack. With a shimmy, he began to take off his open fatigue shirt to cover her.

He'd never know that was the plan all along.

A gauntleted hand grabbed and wadded the Lieutenant's shirt in its grip from behind a stack of tires. The biggest and strongest of the marines now had his hands bound in his shirt sleeves, completely at the mercy of the ambush. With a clean hit, a brass lined padded knuckle delivered a heavy blow to the marine officer from behind. The strike landed in the soft tissue at the bottom of the skull where it connected to the vertebra. The big man folded like a lifeless doll, only held up by the cowled avenger who swept from his crouching position in the darkness.

With a startled flinch and gasp at the sudden appearance of the human predator, Wilkerson drew his Billy club from his belt. In that time his hooded opponent had drawn Jacks' club from the back of his pants. The avenger met Wilkerson's heavy swing at the point of attack. The two batons met with an ear popping clack that echoed through the shop. In the aftermath, the vibration caused an almost unbearable stinging ache through the marine's hand. Using the distraction from the sudden pain, the hooded fighter pivoted back, and thrust the stick's point into the center spot underneath the chest. With the Marine's solar plexus traumatized, he spun, snatching the Billy club from Wilkerson's reeling grip. Without breaking momentum, the attacker slammed both clubs against the sailor's temple in his tight spin. Upon the dual strike, an explosion of purple and red veins appeared on the impact mark as Wilkerson tumbled into an avalanche of tires.

Through the confusion of what had been happening, Miller had drawn his combat knife ready for a fight. But he hesitated at the sudden, fluid, and brutal combination of the dispatching of his friends. Confidence shaken, his only thought was to let go, to get crazed, get insane in the fight for his life. He used the weariness of the day, of all the loss he suffered through this terrible war, and this ruined world to build his anger. Combined with the desperation to see the past again he let it all boil over into a black rage. With a roar he flipped his knife upside down, and stabbed for the shadow that expertly twirled his sticks in anticipation. Both batons clicked when the avenger crossed them and thrusted upward to meet the vertical stab mid-air. The scissored fight clubs halted the Brooklyn man's arm by trapping his wrist between them. Without missing a beat, he twisted the knife arm one way at an odd angle with a crackle of nerves. He then twisted it the other way, using the batons like strings on a marionette puppet. Hyperextending the arm, the hooded man hammered one of the sticks hard on Miller's straightened elbow. The sound of the hollow thunk of the baton knocking bone out of socket echoed as loud as the man's scream.

But before any more damage could be done to the New York native, the shadow of an Asian woman appeared in the doorway down the corridor. The glint of a Glock pistols' barrel caught emerald eyes just at the most inopportune time for Jesse Flores. Twisting the sailor's broken arm up with one of the clubs and using the other to turn his head, the cowled avenger used Miller as a human shield as four shots tore into the front of the body. Dropping a baton with a clatter to the wooden floor, the hooded fighter drew his Colt with a flick of leather from his back hip under coat. As Flores riddled her own man, two shots from the .45 fired over Miller's shoulder glanced off the metal door and its frame. The former ricocheted, grazing the submarine commander's cheek. The woman ducked out as Cully took her place. The petite woman aimed her plasma rifle and pulled the trigger. As the light bolt flashed through the narrow space, the cowled martial artist disengaged from his human shield. He rolled behind the cover of a stack of tires as the plasma bolt tore apart the corpse of the former Jimmy Carter mechanic. Rather than press her attack Cully shut and bolted the door to the office under the hammered pings of a Colt's bullets.

Jesse was hunched over on the paint chipped carpet holding her hand over a bleeding cheek. "Goddamn bastard!" She hissed in familiarity with their opponent. The chestnut haired soldier grabbed the sailor by the arm, dragging her away from the door when the first thunderous blow shook the frame. Head level with the women was a small bulge in the door. The second thunderous shake grew the bulge into a bubble of warping metal. At the apex of the sphere shaped wart glowing embers were starting to eat their way inside.

"Take cover!" Cully shouted.

Both women reached for each other as they slid behind one of the temp worker's desks as a bolt of light smashed through the metal wart of the office door. As Jesse stayed down, her partner took a knee aiming her rifle at the hole ready for a face to appear. But instead the Tech-Com specialist was met with three sharp clicks of black marbles being flung through the breach. They bounced for two clicks before they rolled at the Australian woman's feet. Both occupants of the room exchanged a confused look.

It all became too clear what their attacker had in mind when a collection of hisses preceded a hazy gas being expelled from each marble. She didn't know what kind of gas the avenger was trying to use on them but luckily she wasn't unprepared. "Come on!" Keeping low to the ground Jesse led Cully to a duffle bag sitting under a barred window surrounded by wood paneling. She pulled out two gas masks, distributing them as both women slipped them on. Several moments later the room was contaminated with a hazy ozone cloud. Even through the mask, the sub commander could smell wet metallic rust funneling through the rebreather. It also made her mouth salivate with the taste a coppery coconut. She knew the sensation, but she just couldn't place it.

Rather than being cooped up in the office with an open window to be fired on, Cully strode toward the plasma hole in the door frame. Cocking the rifle she pointed it through breach. "I'll cover you. You make a break for it!" The soldier's voice was muffled as she unbolted the door.

"_Jesse! Put that down … gently." _

"_Wow, hard ass Derek Reese, a nutter for vintage marbles." _

"_It's not a toy …" _

"_Oh right … it's a "collector's" item. That's nerd speak right?" _

"_Connor designed it, carries a gas inside. Compound that mucks with the chemical reaction in Plasma Rifles inner workings, causes them to back fire." _

"_That's eloquent for a High School freshmen." _

"_Fine, how 'bout you drop that in here and the next target practice will be everyone's last." _

"_Funny Derek."_

Jesse's eyes went wide. "Cully, NO!" She screamed as her partner aimed the rifle through the hole.

Just one slip of the trigger was all it took. At first it seemed like a false alarm, the rifle did nothing, seemingly a simple jam. "What?" Cully was startled by the desperation and terror in the Asian woman's voice after the fact. Jesse would never forget the last look in the woman's eyes before a pressurized explosion of violet light tore the plasma rifle into tiny pieces of shrapnel that eviscerated Cully into an explosion of pink mist, limbs, and an attractive head that went flying in every direction. While the parts of her body that stayed intact were flayed by the plasma's heat till there was nothing left but a charred ribcage, left leg, and right arm.

A sickness filled the woman's chest at the butchered sight of the soldier that had been her friend. It only spread at the swirling thoughts of the hunting and killing of what was left of her crew, and most of all the piece of Cully's rifle that was embedded in her side. Numbness spread through Jesse Flores from where the rifle piece was stuck. Hunched over on the floor, forehead to the carpet, Jesse held her side. They had all had a dream once, every person that got the star tattoo on their arm. It had stood for a better tomorrow for all of mankind. They had been the true freedom fighters of humanity. Now they were all dead, lying on some shitty dusty floor breathing their last breaths.

The gas was starting to get to her, the smell, and the metal in her mouth. She couldn't stay in the room, not after what she had just seen. Finding her feet with an agonized cry, powered by some unknown force of will from inside, she stumbled to the door. It squealed miserably, covered in .45 caliber dents and a large hole of still blazing embers cooked by plasma ozone. Jesse held her side as she fell to her knees at the doorway. Ripping off her gas mask, she sucked in shaky breaths while holding herself up with one hand. Beads of sweat dripped from her nose as she gasped desperately for fresh air.

Suddenly something cold and heavy pressed hard to the back of her head. She turned to find double grip soles of grimy leather boots standing next to the door frame, waiting out of sight for someone to rush out without checking corners. She looked up to find a hooded figure with blue flecked emerald eyes looking down at her mercilessly, like she was lower than dirt.

She scoffed humorlessly at the sight of the dark avenger. "Well, Well, Well, _The Great Mouse Detective_ as a live and breath." She said the nickname as condescending as possible turning her sight back to the floor.

"Screw up." He greeted back with distaste so very evident in his raspy intimidating voice.

She chuckled mirthlessly at the name he leveled her with. It got under her skin more than he thought. Sometimes it was just the way he said things. "How?" She asked in grudging defeat.

"Garvin." He tilted his head, eyes intense with hatred. "Man broke his tooth on your victims knuckle. The rest was … _Elementary_ Flores." He paused before delivering the cutting blow to the intelligence of the woman still on her knees.

"Should've shot that little wanker when he wouldn't fight. Trail would've been cold, even for you."

"Shoulda, woulda … _didn't_."

The force of his voice made her cringe. If she could, she would've cracked him good in the mouth for the same arrogance he's always had. He never respected rules, had no honor to the man next to him, and always self-righteous to a fault. There should've been some sort of allowance made for the men and women lying dead around them. They had been under his command once; they had fought behind him. Now he hunted all of them down like dogs, or worse. All for metal, just like the rest of _his kind_.

She moaned in discomfort as she stood on her knees to face him. Pressing her forehead to the barrel of his gun, her muddy brown eyes looked up innocently at him. "So is this the way it ends, _Baker Street_?" She asked with a snap to her accent. "Huh, you gonna execute me on my knees? Is that what _mommy_ taught you to do?" She asked coldly motioning to his old leather coat.

At the mention of his mother, the man whipped his gun across her face. She caught herself with an outstretched arm before she fell to the floor. A sudden torturous pain gripped her as she felt the shrapnel in her side move deeper into the meaty section under her ribs. Reaching into his pocket he crouched to get level with the injured woman holding her purpled cheek. He looked her straight in her glassy eyes. "Good dogs are put to sleep, mad ones die alone in the street …" He showed her a familiar wedding ring. "You tell me where _she_ is." He demanded of the submarine commander with a dark voice.

"Don't know what you're talking about." She spat defiantly.

They stared down one another as he crouched. She could almost see the smirk of dangerous amusement form underneath the old scarf covering most of his face. It was a quirk that enraged her. Not because he was mocking her, but because it reminded her of the man she loved. The avenger stood to full height and after a beat he brought his foot down on the woman's injured side. Jesse screamed long and hard at the horrible pain that she had only seen in field hospitals.

"The ring's too small to fit on the farmer's finger, Flores! There's also freshly dried blood inside the band! She was there when you killed him! You took her after you waisted him and you're going to tell me where!" He pressed harder on the wound. "I've got all night!" he gritted his teeth with hatred.

Frustration built from a vicious pain in her side caused the woman to lash out. "You're gonna have to shoot me! Because I got nothing to say to you, metal loving freak!" She screamed at him bitterly. At the primal disregard and feral nature of the former sailor's accusation the hooded avenger removed his foot. The release of pressure brought a new ache that made her bite her tongue till it was gashed and bloody.

"I wouldn't long for death so soon, Flores." He advised once again crouching eye level with her. "The deepest circles of hell are for mutineers and traitors." The voice he used was as foreboding as it was raspy and dark.

She spat blood on the wooden floor. "Speak for yourself." The red liquid ran down the corner of her mouth as she motioned to the dead Marines around her. "All this waste, and for what?" She asked in disbelief, shaking her head. "Metal?" She made the word sound like a taboo curse stricken from the sacred holy books. "Hope you've got a bullet in there for yourself after this." The venom in her voice was vicious and defiant.

There was something crazed that moved genetically in fierce emerald eyes. "I'm not wasting a bullet on you." He corrected her with a shake of his head. "You tell me where she is. If you don't, I'll find her, with or without your help eventually. But not before I dump you and the girl out there in front of one of the outlying tunnel communities." He gripped her by the throat.

"You of all people should know how hard it is to get fresh meat in Los Angeles."

###

The door to the reception and waiting area of the auto shop opened and closed with a squeaking bang of age and rusted hinges, announcing the cowled man's entrance into the frigid garage. Corroded aluminum shutters where pulled down and locked on both sides of the open air work area. To his left and right were stations where people had driven their cars up to be changed of oil or a battery. They were repairs on the automobiles of a world that most now so seldom knew of. On the floor at each station were chipped yellow and black striped jacks that lifted the broken vehicle above the mechanics head so he could work on the guts and frame underneath. The area was old, smelling of scrubbed stale grease and aged rubber, but mostly it smelled like abandonment. He placed hands in his coat pockets as he paced over the black and white checkered lines on the floor. Caution markers for mechanics driving their car too close to other stations. His eyes searched the garage for anything, any clue that could lead him in the right direction.

He took time making notes of exits and of anything out of place. From one of the stations he could see that there was still a Cadillac up on the jacks, most of it covered by a dusty tarp. This alone seemed to be a telling sign that he was in the right place. He stood in the center of the garage and looked around with narrowed eyes. The dusty and rusted appearance of the shop dated the foreclosure somewhere over forty years ago. He'd place it in the mid 80's by the appearance of a 1984 Lincoln Continental owner's handbook on top of the desk in the reception area. His deduction corroborated by the sitting room magazines that had a girl named Brooke Shields on the cover. While he approached the suspended car, he found dusty but newer power tools at a workstation. It also didn't come as a shock when he pulled the dirty tarp off to find the Cadillac was a late 2000's model.

"Chop Shop." He muttered.

It was common place in the Old City for gangs dealing in drugs or in car thievery to occupy one of the many abandoned buildings of the Old City. They were the perfect hideouts— inconspicuous, out of the way. No one would be looking for them amongst the foreclosure graveyard spurned by the last generation, with their mountains of permed hair and Duran Duran music. Only the smartest cops in the years before the war could be clever enough to look under the rusted gates of the forgotten.

The next step was to find the hiding spot. No one who ran these illegal operations ever left the merchandise just sitting around for just anyone to see. Even in barren ghost towns like this, the boss would have somewhere to stash the stolen parts. He could cross off anywhere back inside the office and reception area. Some of the parts would be too heavy and inconvenient to be taken inside. It would be somewhere in the garage.

He didn't have to look hard to find his answer. Arrogance was the downfall of the Marines that had occupied the shop. If Flores had wanted to hide her golden ticket, she wouldn't have done such a shoddy job covering her tracks. But the truth from all evidence was simply that they weren't expecting to get caught, or even expecting to be chastised for what they had done. The certainty of self-righteousness and assumed morality was the bane of intelligence and reason to the one rule in this world.

Anything that could happen would happen. And Certainty was a luxury.

There was a workbench just outside of an obscure closet door. He walked toward it and observed that stacks of power tools lay halfheartedly disregarded on top by the workmen who had just recently used them. He crouched next to the electric powered impact guns, screw drivers, and drills. He picked up one of the power saws and observed a dark, viscous, chalky liquid of some sort coating the rusty metal teeth. Reaching into his inner coat pocket the man drew an old, chrome handled magnifying glass. With one good look through the Zeiss lens he got a closer prospective of the blood and skin smeared savagely over the blade. In that moment he knew that he had been wrong.

This murder had been committed by thieves.

Tossing away the saw with disgust to the sound of clatter, he snarled bitterly. Standing to full height, the avenger pocketed his magnifying glass again within his inherited coat. He spent time picking each one up. Most of the drill bits and screws had blood on them also, some more dry than others. But he found himself tilting his head when he reached the last tool and noticed that all of them were still plugged in. If they had been just piled up after work, why take the trouble of plugging in elsewhere?

He mentally took a measure of the length of the power tool cords and divided it by the radius in which they could stretch. His haunted, fierce, emerald eyes halted at the appearance of a closet door close by. On the greening brass of the door knob there was a smeared, bloodstained, fingerprint.

It was the smell that hit him first when the door opened, throwing his silhouette down the newly lit narrow corridor. The horrible scent was putrid and septic, like an unsanitary field hospital, or a room temperature meat locker. All with the carbon emission of an auto repair shop being run within them. When he passed the doorway he found on each side of himself were shelves of diamond grating. Each one housed everything and anything that could be found in luxury and high end sports cars. From satellite radios, GPS, to high horse power engine valves covered with a petrified black coating that used to be oil. When he reached the last shelf at the end of the corridor, he found the source of a smell only known in nightmares.

It was a black, oil stained towel that might have been white at one time. He tapped his finger on it, rubbing the solvent between his index finger and thumb. It was fairly new oil. But as he looked over the towel he noticed that there were also blood stains and splatters all over it— globs and thick puddles of blood had mixed with the inky blotches. It was as if the Marines had been drying off and cleaning object that had been coved in hydraulic fluid and smeared in thick blood.

But it was something in the corner of his eye that captured him. The hooded man had been so preoccupied by observing the ancient car parts in storage that he hadn't noticed what was right in front of him. At the end of the short narrow path was a wider part of the secret room. Around the incomplete squared space, engines, mufflers, and car stereos sat at the perimeter of the room. To his right a single bared window poured light from the glow of the night onto the scene in front of him.

"My God!"

Dangling from a pulley system above were rusted chains that snaked down, wrapping themselves around a naked female's body. Hoisting her arms above her head and wrapped as tight as a hangman's noose around her supple neck. The girl was petite, with smooth skin as pale as snow and as soft as milk. Her head had been shaved roughly, tuffs of hair still clung to her fuzzed scalp. Both her ocean blue eye and her darkened camera eye stared out at nothing. But it was the rest of her that caused the man to be shocked silent. From collar bone to crotch, her skin and muscle had been cut open and peeled back like a hanging slab of meat at the butcher's shop, or an autopsied cadaver. From inside her extensively carved cavities was a scuffed and scorch stained endoskeleton that had been exposed for all to see. The sleek machine's armored chest plate had been unscrewed from the body, exposing all of the inner workings. Or it might have, since many of her processors and parts from her chest down to her crotch had been unscrewed and pulled out of her.

It was only now that he realized that they had never been after the farmer. Jesse and her mutineers had been after his lover for her parts. Even now in the underground a simple secondary power source from a T-600 could power a tunnel for three months. There was a market for salvaged machine parts and for this T-700 they could split a fortune … or earn one large favor from someone of note.

A bubble tech that could send them back in time.

While he looked at her, the vigilante's face looked drained of color, filled with a deep distaste that went down to the roots of his soul. It was just the way he pictured them, eyeing the cyborg girl like an inept lion looking to tackle a hobbled zebra. The sanctioned predatory nature of the evil deeds that they felt was justified to something that wasn't a human. It didn't get any worse than what had happened tonight.

There was a time the man had thought that eventually if he finished what was started all those years ago. That if he had picked up the banner and fought on, that eventually all the monsters would be gone and the sun would rise over a peaceful land filled with hope and a new tomorrow. He thought that all his loved ones —the people he cared about, those he had buried with his own two hands— their deaths would not have been in vain. But he knew that that was exactly what it was, for nothing. There was no end. He had naively thought of the monsters of his youth. They were made of metal and silicone, emotionless killers. They were science experiments gone feral with filed down teeth. Mutants, ruined, barbaric, and savage forms of life exposed to too much nuclear fallout. They were dwarfs that placed children in death traps, and voodoo priests that brainwashed people into doing their bidding with nanites and a blue powder. But what he had come to realize tonight was that not all monsters wore a preacher's clothing and a hanged man's noose around their neck as they terrorized with a skull painted on their face and neon teeth. Not all emotionless killers had glowing red eyes. Their hatred and senseless violence did not always come from deformities.

The motive of the lynching, this monstrosity in front of him, the sight of it, the brutality, it all brought into question what it was that was left of the Tech-Com he had once known and fought for. He blamed himself for it, for all of it. They had done their job well, too well, all the old guard and pioneers of the Resistance. They had driven off the machines, shot all the mutants, and hung most of the grays. Now there was nothing that united humanity, no pressing foe, nothing left to kill but each other. The institution he had once believed in so firmly was nothing more than a tattered and washed out flag spent too many years on a bay front. Its colors bled by the endless years of violent storms. It remained at its post, its mission intact, but its pride and dignity forgotten, faded into obscurity, like him.

After taking a moment of composure, he strode to the pulley station at a control panel to the right of the brutal scene. Each lever that he drove down squealed in protest at the weight that it had been expected to carry. As the machinery roared to life it began lowering the girl to the concrete floor. The rusted chains loosening their grip on her broken skin, showing marks where it bit her bloody.

The man was there, under her, as the chains slowly lowered her into his arms. He collected her as one might a fragile human being on their last breaths. He slipped down to his knees cradling her in his leather clad arms. His gauntleted hand rubbed her auburn fuzzed head comfortingly. At the contact there was a sudden wire and wheezed clicking like a dying clock on the last sparks of a chewed battery. Suddenly there was a softest glow of a red eye that barely broke the darkness. A single blue eye found the hooded man looming over her. There was an emotionless deadpan in her stoic gaze and yet there was an innocent trust in the way she looked at him. It had been years since he had seen that look and his heart sank into the darkness of a painful loss many years ago.

She frowned as his eyes lightened in sorrow. "You're not one of them?" She asked unafraid and unaffected, though quietly.

"No." He shook his head. His voice unaltered and normal sounded youthful, and yet deep and aged in a lasting unshakeable sorrow.

"Will they be back?" She might have moved her head to look through the open door way. But she had so very little energy left in her body.

His hand rubbed her head again. "No … I … made sure they wouldn't." He tried hard not to see who his heart reminded him of. Those same lonesome feelings filled him again, a pain of familiarity of a moment that forever haunted him.

She watched him with a childlike innocence. "I don't have much time … they removed much of my power converters." She explained with the unshakable acceptance of what was coming.

"What's your name?" He asked in light of the circumstances.

"TOJ 710" She stated with an almost preprogrammed automated voice.

He was quiet a long moment before he spoke. "What did _he_ call you?" He asked gently.

She didn't react to the question. The girl just blinked. "Ariel." She answered. "It was because of my hair … but they shaved it off. They said I didn't need it, didn't deserve it." She explained.

He stopped her with a shake of his head. "It doesn't matter what they think now." He then nodded in encouragement.

"He laughed …" She continued. "When he first named me, he laughed because his name was Eric and mine was Ariel. He said it was from a movie … do you know it?" She asked curiously.

His eyes went glassy. "I do …" He swallowed hard. "It was uh …" He cleared his throat. "It was my _mother's_ favorite movie." He bowed his head.

She did the same, each servo in her neck grinding like a slow gear in a dying clock. For a long moment she did nothing, said nothing, it was for a beat as if she had finally shut down. "He's dead." Her voice never lost the stoicism, but there was something almost mourning in the way she spoke of him.

"I know." He nodded.

The mangled cyborg looked up to the ceiling. "He had wanted to plant apple trees. He wanted to grow fruit of some kind." She paused. "I guess we won't now." She turned back and locked eyes with the man who held her in her final moment. "I wish I could've seen him again … one last time." She admitted.

The man reached into his coat pocket and produced a wedding ring. She watched as he lifted her hand and slipped the band on her finger. "Somehow and someway you will." He comforted her. "I promise." As he spoke he thought of the same fantasy he had himself for so many years. It was a sentiment that he had promised another dying man, many years ago.

Suddenly a hand reached up and cupped his cheek. Her eyes were glowing again as she stared at him, with a familiarity. In the last moments her facial recognition software came alive for just a beat. But it was gone as soon as it came back. A frown furthered her brow.

"You used to be someone."

"A longtime ago …" He began to confirm when the wheezed noises of her inner workings fell silent forever. With the last moaning shutting down of power her hand fell to her side.

In a natural spotlight from a filthy window in the corner of a secret room, the last of a legacy cradled a dead machine in an echo of the past. Just for a moment he was a boy again, watching two soul mates in their final moments together. The sudden memory brought a thunderous pain from the deepest chambers of his heart that was almost as old as the man himself. As the sky lightened outside in the coming of dawn the pang of icy precipitation turned to the cold splatter of rain.

"I used to be somebody."


	7. Live Oak

_There's a man who walks beside me_

_It is who I used to be  
And I wonder if she sees him  
and confuses him with me  
And I wonder who she's pinin' for  
on nights I'm not around  
Could it be the man who did the things  
I'm living now?_

**"_Live Oak" By Jason Isbell_**

* * *

_Many Years Ago_

There was a sun the color of crimson surrounded by purple clouds of morning. It was a water painting of a heavenly response through the dark obscurity that chases away the heaviness from the hearts of the lost. A wilderness of concrete, glass, and metal was set aflame from the east where light broke free from a long slumber glimmering through the ozone haze of the millions of lives ready to begin anew. Within this blessed time in the coming of dawn there was hope. Hope of what today brings, what tomorrow held, and what the future may unfold. On this particular morning there seemed to be something more to the hellish nightmare of broken dreams and hard times that erupted from the pavement where women, whiskey, and gold had eternally been promised. Maybe there was always something more. Maybe a life spent seeing the world one way for so long would end. Here in the early dawn sat and cultivated something in a lonely heart that had changed its prospective.

High on a hill of the softest grass, its blades sweeping in rows in the chilled morning breeze, stood a tree. On its skinny youthful branches was a colorful assortment of the first blossoms of what might grow to be someday the juiciest of red fruit. The apples of tomorrow would nourish and save the lives of many pocket universes that revolved around a much bigger tragedy that would befall the entire planet in the years to come. Standing in sight of the endless grids of skyscrapers and the bustle of modern life, ever overlooking the city silhouetted against the mountains. Here was one of the most important trees in the history of humanity. No one knew it yet, nor suspected the importance of this random anomaly. It's origins as humble and unassuming as an apple core being left behind from a picnic. Its only significances being the rusted ammo box gifted from a grandfather to his grandsons buried at its base.

Inside the ammo box were little jokes, and teasing poems, treasured items from great childhood conquests. Over the years it became a marker, a meeting point, a place to see the world on fire for the two brothers. Together they'd stand on the crest of the hill that one awful morning looking upon the ruin of their old lives. But in their darkest of moments it was the first crunch of an apple. It was the taste of its sweet juices that would fill them with hope. It was a little taste of an old life. A reminder of happier days that would convince the brothers, destined with great deeds ahead of them, that it wasn't the end of the world … just a new one meant to be made better than the old if they fought for those cherished memories buried at the very roots of this very tree.

For now that new world and the evil within it seemed like the flicker of the darkest day dream in a momentarily troubled mind. In the many years to come while standing sentry through the hard times, seeing the world change and change again, it was the first new world this tree saw that some might claim had blessed it. Of a great love's first night in the arms of one another that christened it with a purpose. While the sun rose high in the picturesque sky of an unusual dawn the tree's thin but canopied branches brought shade over a parked vehicle. A blue Jeep had been driven up the hill, parked broadside of the singular view of this strange magic at work. Within the back seat sat two individuals who had grown into something else, something closer, more primal than lovers. Over the years there were many who had tried to explain, tried to put into words what the two were to one another. But it would be hard, for there was only a feeling, a knowing deep within one's self to understand it, to understand them.

All that could be said was simply that it was the purest and most impossible kind of love to be found in the whole universe. She was a beautiful girl, who wasn't a girl but a machine. He was a handsome boy, who wasn't a boy but a hero of an entire species. They were two beings of the most Improbable origins finding one another, loving one another all while sharing the same soul. The girl's white dress was stained with her blood, soiled with the dirt of a high end parking lot. But there were no complaints as she lay against the boy's chest. Her silky bare back snuggly pressed against the soft cotton of his long sleeve shirt. His arms, growing stronger every day, wrapped around her waist. Her cheek was pressed against his stubble as she reclined stiffly against him. His nose buried in her hair as they watched the sunrise.

John and Cameron had not said a word to one another since the fight in the parking lot. From the moment John had killed the beast, taking Cameron by the hand, he had driven as far as he could from the scene. The cyborg had thought he'd take them home, but he had missed every turn off. John hadn't stopped driving, he just kept going. She never asked where they were going, and if they'd ever get there. For a moment he was sure that his cyborg companion thought he'd take them out of the city. Not stop till they saw the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. He smirked when he knew she probably wouldn't stop him either. It was tempting to just keep going, to leave all this behind and find a place remote, arrive somewhere hidden by the lushness of solitude and live off one another. Their sustenance, their lives maintained by the soulful touches, the lifetimes worth of passionate physicality, and the sheer emotional bliss of this great love that had overcome him. Maybe this morning he might have tried to do just that, to take Cameron away somewhere safe, unhunted. But there was something about this place that had captured him since he first saw it. He couldn't explain the feeling he got when he looked out at the rural road and was overcome by a strange pull of a great sentimentality for the skinny tree standing on the hill. Cameron had just stared at him when he had stopped, watched as he climbed into the back of his mother's Jeep. When he held his arms out to her she didn't understand, but never questioned or hesitated from John Connor's outstretched arms. She also climbed into the back and let him lay her against him. She didn't understand what they were doing until the red light began to appear from the walls of night above. Machines didn't understand wonder, couldn't appreciate the coming of day like humans could. But there was a sense of emotion, of marking this sunrise. It was the first morning of forever. Never separated, never longing, forever together from this moment on.

But as the sun had now passed over the mountains in the distance and the sunrise had come and gone, reality would have the day. The morning was a double edged sword. Often thought to chase away the darkness in the sky and in the heart, it was also the sobering of such impossible dreams and thoughts. In the night there came ideas and grand gestures that in the first light of day were cleansed from the mind like the first rains of spring. For John and Cameron there was a dead Gorilla lying in a parking lot. It was an albino beast that had killed three, and acutely came after Cameron. They had the night for themselves, and the dawn to cherish. But now doubt and confusion began to grow within.

Cameron watched John's hand reach up, his fingers slowly massage the baby soft skin of a throat that had been ripped out only hours before. Her eyes lightened and unseen was a hint of regret. "Are you feeling better?" he asked in her ear.

The girl frowned. "I've never felt different." She replied in confusion, turning her neck to see him. He rolled his eyes, lulling his head in slight disappointment against her bare shoulder. It would've been nice if she could've at least humored him.

"Are you all healed up?" He sighed.

A strand of hair fell into her eyes when she nodded. "Yes." She answered confidently. He nodded with her.

"Good …" He kissed her bare shoulder, and then rested his nose on it thoughtfully. Golden eyes watched him with curiosity.

John had never done that before, kissed her. There was ownership and franchise to the way he held her, touched her. She liked it, was drawn to it. But it wasn't the first time someone had kissed her bare shoulder. This wasn't the first time someone had held her, loved her. All of this made her think of the aircraft carrier, and of the dead beast.

She remembered the curiosity and the cautious trust in its red eyes when she had first met him there. All the other animals on the aircraft carrier snapped and howled. They hated her, felt her, smelt her, and knew what she was. But the ape, the ape knew and didn't react the way the others had. Its brothers and sisters in captivity had been wild, taken from their homes from where ever they could be found natively. But the albino had been born and raised in captivity, known another's face and hands to feed him. He was the soul of wonder, of interest, a childlike curiosity of the dauntless beauty new to the tactile world. She'd stand outside his cage for hours as he attempted to entertain and amuse her with the limited resources they allowed of him. Then one day she was ordered to bring him to the engine room.

"What's wrong?"

Cameron had sat up from John's arms. The sensation, the contentment with all of what was inside of her, had turn to ash. Remembering the Gorilla and its roars, the looks of betrayal as he hung suspended, its giant body trebling as webs of electricity bolts climbed over him. She could still smell the singed fur of the animal as they shocked it and shocked it, always the voltage going higher. When John placed a hand on her bare back, she shuddered. On the aircraft carrier was the man with glasses, the pointed chin. He was the first, the first to claim everything in her life. He was the first who brought her presents, the first to push a strand of hair from her face, the first to kiss her … the first to touch her. His love was corrupting, his obsessions had become hers. She knew nothing of the world in those days but what he taught her, and what he taught her was evil. As she worked the knobs, and the levers, asking the questions to the suffering, begging her for mercy … his hands worked inside her. Sucking, penetrating, pleasuring her as their victims screamed, and cried. This man tried to physically program her sensations. To make her understand how he felt when he watched her "preform." He wanted to ruin her till only when someone was in pain could she feel the rush of elicit pleasure. He'd remake his bride, his prize, into a twisted copy of himself. It wasn't till she first saw the man who earned all of her first lover's obsessive hatred, sitting alone at a table, brooding. Only when she saw John Connor did she understand that she didn't belong to _the professor. _That he wasn't teaching the girl her purpose in life, he was corrupting her. That she had been stolen from her _mother_. That this man and his evil, illogical calculating mind had stolen her first kiss, her first love, and many other firsts that only now she realized had always belonged to another.

In that moment she had let the memories of her past taint this feeling of belonging, of righteousness in the arms of her purpose.

"Cameron?" John called after her as she exited the cab.

She walked out to the crest of the hill and looked out to the city below. Watching the flash of headlights, and neon shone brightly in the last pockets of darkness in the early morning. It was like her mind, her memories. Sarah Connor had asked her if she remembered what she had done to Derek. She had lied. Cameron Baum remembered every face, every wrong … every evil she ever did. Suddenly she felt as she always had, afraid and unsure. She wondered if all that hatred and cruelty drummed in her was still there. Was it possible that she could still hurt John? That one day she'd snap and unwittingly visit each torture and monstrosity taught to her on this man who had taken her in, retaught her how to be herself, a man that she had loved for so long.

"What is it?" John followed her to the view.

She felt his hand touch her back, strafing the cool skin, flawless and unblemished. In the short time they'd come together John hadn't been able to stop from just touching her. Bereft of her for so long, keeping his feelings locked inside, he couldn't help himself from petting and stroking her. Together they had wanted this, Cameron even longer than John. But she felt tainted and unworthy of this treatment, of this familiar affection that felt so pure and right as opposed to the last time she had been touched like this by another's hand.

There was a wild look of confusion when the cyborg slipped away from his touch. "What is going on?" He asked suddenly serious as she stoically refused to look at him. Cameron did not respond. She frowned while looking over the city below. It wasn't an egotistical anger or even possessive when John reached out and twirled the girl around to face him. He was worried and scared, feeling the sinking sensation of a wonderful dream turn into a nightmare. He placed both hands on her arms to hold her in place, though the likelihood of that being the case was little. In reality the girl could pitch him off the hill in just the turn of her shoulders. He opened his mouth address her, as his emerald eyes searched her golden orbs.

"He thought she was me." Cameron spoke before him.

John felt as if he had arrived in the middle of a conversation. "What?" he asked.

"Melinda Young, the albino gorilla thought she was me, he killed her because I look like her." She explained.

John frowned. "I … I figured that was the case." He nodded. "I just don't understand how and why he was here … what he was sent for." The teen wasn't sure what any of this had to do with why Cameron was walking away from their comfort.

The girl looked almost ashamed. "He is the first." She didn't look away from him. Even with nothing behind those stoic eyes, John felt like he was in the middle of a death bed confession. If she told him the truth of all that was wrapped up in the mystery, she'd die. John would not want her anymore, and she would cease to exist when he left her.

"The first what?" he asked.

Cameron tilted her head. "The Gorilla was the first time traveler in history." She explained. "He was the very first living subject to go through the Time Displacement Equipment." Her voice was determined to speak the truth.

There was a pensive glare in John Connor's eyes. "That's why the cement …" He thoughtfully paced away from Cameron. "That's why the bubble opened above ground, rather than on it. It was the first test." He tugged his chin in thought. "The cement, it was supposed to …" he turned back to Cameron.

The girl tightened her cheek. "He was supposed to appear in the cement, become trapped inside it. The newspapers and media would report …" She began.

"And it would be in the news archives for _Skynet_ to monitor, to see if the experiment was a success." John and Cameron had begun, without slipping, sharing and finishing one another's thoughts. Never had man and machine been linked so exclusively in mind. It was another puzzled improbability that many could not and would not attempt to explain.

John Connor frowned while replaying the facts, the things he knew of the case backwards and forwards. But one thing didn't make sense. For weeks the gorilla had been living in the back streets and parking garages of the Hills. He had been eating other's garbage, killing any other animal that threatened its territory, like the eviscerated alley cat he had found in the alley. But why did he kill Melinda Young because she looked like Cameron?

John turned back to ask. But just one quick gaze in her direction and the cyborg bowed her head. It was as if she had heard his thoughts, knew what was coming next, the answers that had kept them apart for so long. To her credit, the girl didn't turn away from the man she loved, didn't flinch under his hardened scrutiny as he waited for her to answer.

"John …" She began. There was no turning away now, no hiding. "I've spoken before of the idea that "we're" not built to be cruel." Cameron reminded him.

The youth was confused, but never the less he stayed with her. "Yeah …" he confirmed with an understand nod.

"It's true." She nodded. ""They're" not built to be cruel." Her voice quivered just slightly and it drew John closer to her.

"They … but not you?"

There was no flinching in Cameron's posture. "I've done things, John." She spoke as if it was a confirmation.

There was a long beat of silence between them. "Cruel things?" He pushed. The revelation did halt him.

The teenage girl watched John place his hands in his pockets. "Yes." She answered almost cautiously. "Things that a machine, like me, shouldn't do, that the others are not built for. I've hurt animals and tortured humans for no other reason, even when logic dictated that I stop. The gorilla killed Melinda Young, because he saw me, John. Because the last time he saw that face, it was torturing him … just to see how main worked." She didn't blink, waiting for John to react in anger.

She could imagine the way his family would take this news. She saw Sarah Connor with her righteous anger, masking a disgust and fear of this mechanical monster. Next to her was Derek Reese, a cold hatred, remembering what she had done to him in the basement of her and _The Professor's_ very own plantation house. She waited for John to have either inherited reaction. But he seemed quietly interested in what she had told him.

"Why did you stop?" John asked stoically. "Why did you change, distance yourself from that life?" He shrugged.

The cyborg was sure that he would've looked at her differently after all she divulged. But at the moment it was almost as if this terrible honesty of the early years of her life somehow made him love her more. It was quietly occurring to her that John, this man she loved, and thought she might lose this very morning, knew all the answers, almost before she did.

"I saw you." She admitted. "You were sitting alone at a table. You met my eyes across the room and you smiled at me." She recalled as if it was happening all over again. "It was as if you were waiting for me, and that I had arrived after so many years of being lost." She took a step closer to him. "After that I realized that I wasn't what they wanted me to be. That I wasn't a machine like the others and yet, I wasn't the monster they made me." Cameron's mind was far off, her golden eyes drawn to the horizon.

John Connor smirked at his love with a sorrowful commiseration. "You didn't belong." The youth knew the lonesome prospects of being trapped in a distinction from the rest of your peers. Never normal, and yet often feeling like you never are what they all think you were.

But Cameron looked up to him with a shake of her head. "No" She protested. "I did belong somewhere." John closed the space between them. His hands reached up, fingers threading through her glossy locks that tussled perfectly in the chilled California breeze.

"And where was that?" He asked quietly.

There was a long pause from the girl. There wasn't relief that had overcome the cyborg. It was a momentary surprise of all that she had always been so afraid to tell him that she knew with all her intuition would cost her their relationship. Cameron's past had always weighed on any weakness that had drawn her closer to John. All of it didn't seem to affect the way he looked at her. So for the first time in her life, she allowed herself to let go.

"Where ever you are."

Hearing what he had been waiting for brought a tear to John's eye. He had waited his whole lonely life and many others through the permutations of this endless multiverse to hear the girl he loved so completely say that to him, to never be alone again. He cupped her cheeks and held her face close to his.

"All of that is the past, the future … it doesn't matter to me, because it's not the present. You are here with me now. All that matters is tomorrow, and the next day. And as long as you're with me they'll never be as hard as the roads I've traveled without you by my side."

It was under the skinny apple tree, its branches raining blossoms down on top of them. Two impossible individuals that shouldn't exist shared their first kiss. Within it created a shockwave that was felt throughout the streams of time and space and for a only a second the fires of a great war that consumed it died down …

And for just a prayer's breath there was peace.

* * *

_Now_

There was no sun. A gray obscurity had covered the sky, bathing everything in an overcast of grays and blues on the cold morning. The world seemed as hopeless and desolate in this light, bereft of a future. Below, the nubs and stumps of concrete and bent rebar called to no one in particular. The damp wind, as uncomfortable as a wet towel after a cold swim, spoke through the cracks and creases of old debris and twisted metal with a shrill voice like a suffering crone in hospices care, wanting to die. The devastation of an old and forgotten civilization had begun to visibly decay in the many years that it had sat in the middle of powdered and scorched concrete and fissured, brittle asphalt. The grids and cross-sections of a vast vibrant urban world that had stood at the center of universe were now covered by toppled buildings and collapsed tunnels. It was a city that had died long ago and on this day it was a forgone conclusion that it would be buried in its disrepair. Forever surrendered to the slow decay of time.

Standing above the haunted and doomed remains of what would never be again, stood an ash strewn hill of packed earth. The crest was dampened by a cold rain like the cheeks of a mother at a funeral that she never imagined she'd ever live to see. At the apex of the hill was a tall and strong tree that stood watch over the longest nights and brightest days of a world, a universe all of its own. Like a chronicler of old it had seen the bright lights of Hollywood to the bright lights of vicious battles fought between human and machine. Its trunk standing firm in the violent thunder of great storms of the earth and the hurricanes of artillery duels fought in the places where the glamorous and beautiful had once gathered in the finest gowns.

In the strong cold wind its thin branches withered and snapped like the creaking and cracking of an old man's bones. In the seasons past, despite whatever weather had come, there could always be found blossoms on the strong branches. Some had called it the beauty that held back the wilderness, a reminder of all that was lost, and could be reclaimed. But like all improbable and impossible things, its old eyes had grown tired. There were no blossoms to be found, no colorful flowers being pushed away by the wind to flutter toward the ruins. Like the aftermath of a father that had gone through the worst trauma a parent could, the tree seemed to have grown old and frail overnight. It's bark graying, its leaves falling away, leaving only bare twigs in their wake. The last holdout fruit clung to the branches, like survivors hanging on till the last moment before their ship sank. They all knew as they held on that they were the last. And when the final red fruit, its body bruised and battered, stubborn to the final moment, finally fell to the earth, there would be no more.

On that day, the tree that had watched over a city, nourished those in need, and gave hope to those that had none would finally wither away with the rest of the rotted miles and acres of the old world. But as all who lay watching the last of their lives pass in front of them, seeing visions of the past. The tree's last moments were filled with the familiar sound of a shovel striking the dirt of its base. There was comfort in the scattered toss of the earth into a pile as the digger lay something precious for the tree's strong roots to protect one last time.

They were laid together, side by side. The retired soldier stiffened by death in his dirty clothing. His arm folded peacefully around a beautiful girl carefully dawned in a shiny wedding gown that was made through many nights with the thought of it bringing the crystal out in her now lone blue eye. A thick crop of deep auburn hair was already growing on top of her lily white head. There was a glint from a polished wedding ring on the girl's hand that lay clasped to her husbands. A layer of rocks protected the lover's mound that lay at the base of the dying tree that had been christened so many years ago by the same kind of love that the doomed marriage had been murdered for.

The solemn silence was interrupted by the forceful clanks of a rock against steel. A makeshift cross, made by rusted metal, was hammered into the dampened soil at the head of their grave. On the horizon the wind picked up like a mournful hymnal. The cold western air rushed over the lithe figure that stood vigil over the grave that he had dug. The tall man was not young, but in the prime of his life. His skin was bronzed from years in the merciless suns of abroad. A thin diagonal facial scar marred his left eye. In the hardened emerald orbs were memories and horrors of a great war that had left them fierce and sharp even when relaxed. His grown out mane of raven curls fluttered in the cold morning air. He was not broadly built, or wide across the chest, but athletic and sharp of mind and fist. The long sleeve Henley he wore was dark navy and threat bare, his sleeves pushed up, the tail fluttering in the wind. A single crimson stripe ran down the outer seams of black combat trousers that muffined over the tops of grimy mahogany colored motorcycle boots.

For a long moment he looked down at the grave he had dug. It was too cold to sweat and too dry to get dirty. His eyes gazed at the mound and those buried inside. Here, in this sacred place where Eric and Ariel had always met in the many years since the night she had saved his life, is where they'd finally stay. They lay hand in hand, slumbering undisturbed and unmolested by the prejudice of the world that killed them, forever together in each other's arms.

He felt as if he should say something, should give them some poetic benediction of a better life. But the words in him had run dry. He had dug so many graves in his life. He had lost so many friends … and most of his family. But it had been such a long time since he had ever felt this way. On the battlefield a soldier comes accustom to seeing the bodies of the dead, of being witness to the grotesque, and familiar with all the horrible ways to die. A man might become so used to it, so numbed that to see a dead body on the side of some road would have as much affect as a dead animal. But this was not the case now. There was no god sent apathy for all that he had seen this night. There might have been a million reasons why the man had felt so affected by this. But there was only one reason in his mind.

Quietly he moved away from the grave back toward the tree. Hung up on the bare low hanging branches was a bandoleer, a utility belt with a scarred .45 colt holstered on the back hip. There also was an old thread bare scarf, as well as a double breasted dark brown coat of beaten leather. Slowly he began to redress himself. The bandoleer snapped on across his chest, the utility belt buckling with a clink over his waist, and wrapping and looping the inherited scarf. Every now and then he looked back at the grave, his eyes flashing with pained memories of long ago. But he pushed past them, till he was slipping on his leather coat. The feeling of it around him in the first moment of shrugging it on had become so familiar to him that sometimes he felt naked going into the desolation without it.

He halted at the final piece missing. Dangling from a skinny snare on a branch was a pocket watch looped around a chain of tarnished silver. The matching watch seemed to have seen its better days many years ago. Scrapes and age was beaten all over the thick protective cover. Carbon scoring and fire scorches obscured the fine craftsmanship. Like so many of the Great Detectives equipment, the watch seemed second hand and inherited after many years of accompanying more than one individual on the hellish battlefield. It was an old talisman that of late seemed to have lost some of its power, and had become more of an item of sentimentality rather than protection. In the aftermath of all that had happened and what the watch itself stood for, in this place, more than any other, he was stopped cold. He reached for the watch, but halted. Emotions welled inside him, old crippling feelings from long ago. He pulled back his extended hand and used it to cover his eyes, only till he turned back to the grave.

Where a grown man stood, an avenger, a detective, an outlaw, in his mind there was only the same sad little child that had stood in the cold woods. Surrounded by the shadow of great snowcapped mountains, the wet smell of Douglas firs and thermite spicing the air, a small boy stood hand in hand with a tall dark figure as a funeral pyre was set ablaze. He had watched the smoke from the fire reach into the sky, to touch the blue moon. All the while, overhead, rockets and missiles passed one another like the most terrible and amazing fireworks display. It was the last day, the first day … Judgment Day. Now so many years later he felt himself at that place again. This time however he was there standing alone, no one left to hold his hand. Like the apples above, he was the last, and when his bruised and battered body had finally fallen … there would be no more of those like him, the end of a legacy.

The man's eyes watched the old tree, feeling as if it was watching him back. Only the two of them, on this last day knew of the impossible and great love that had always resided here. Both of them blessed and touched by it in a way that no one else could ever know. He had come to the old tree to pay respect one last time to that great love the evening this all began. Both of the lovers he had come to touch just one last time had been buried so far away from one another. Ashes and melted droplets scattered to the Pacific Northwestern wind, the other lost forever to the streams of time. Tragically destined and betrayed by fate to never to be at rest next to one another. But in this place, this tree, there essence remained. Within the roots was the specter of a great love that had been left behind. Its effects and memory hummed off the wood like the pick of a heart sore note on a fallen angel's harp. The great, immense power and passion of this love's forbidden nature permanated the ground like a lost love's perfume. The longing and sadness of all that was now missing from this bastion of what the lovers had left together lived on like the haunted lilt of a sorrowful violin.

This place was all the man had left of these impossible lovers.

He reached for the watch and removed it from the tree limb. With a gentle grip he cupped the scarred body in his hands as if it were the most sacred item in any religion. The spring protested audibly and the gears stuck as he pushed his thumb on the button that opened the watch. Inside was not a clock, but a scored and aged control panel that had one solid red button on it. In the outline there had used to be three, the large red one and two smaller black ones. But time and rough fights had seen both black buttons break off. The red one was pressed in and stuck there, broken and useless now for whatever task it had been made for. But green eyes weren't drawn to the mangled contraption within the watch. The man was interested in what was stuck inside the metallic cover. A photograph had been cut to fit inside the round compartment. It was aged and beginning to fade, the edges burned and singed.

Inside was a photograph of a family. They sat on the hood of an old sleek black Mustang that was surrounded by pine trees. The young man was in his early twenties. He wore old jeans, black combat boots, and a familiar double breasted coat of beaten leather. His hair was messily styled, a lock hanging limply on his forehead. There was something haunted and hardened in his emerald eyes that seemed, even as he smiled, somewhat inhuman. His large arm was placed lovingly around an impossibly beautiful girl. She looked no older than seventeen, and yet there was something ageless about this ballerina that suggested she was older than she looked. The beauty had long tresses of glossy chocolate ringlets, and emotionless golden eyes that seemed to portray nothing. She wore a purple leather motorcycle jacket over a white linen dress that was held up by a polished black belt. Her slender legs of perfection were clad in leather knee high boots. Unlike the youth she folded herself into, all that could be said for teenage girl's smile was that there was just a flicker of some jovial amusement buried in her blank face. Sitting on the girl's lap was a very small boy. Big innocent emerald eyes matched those of the young man's as was there a resemblance of a similar face from what could be seen from the mop of loose black curls. Dressed in a thin pullover hoody and jeans, there was a content grin on the boy's face, snuggled into the ballerina's grip, squished between the couple. They all looked so happy that day, the two star-crossed lovers and their impossible child.

That child had thought burying Eric and Ariel here, in _his mother and father's_ place, he'd find closure. He had tried to convince himself that burying them, pretending that it was the two people he loved the most, it would settle the great sorrow that tortured him since he could remember. It hadn't been right, almost heinous for the two of them to die so far away from each other, for the two of them to be scattered to the four winds and never find rest near one another. But standing here, seeing the grave he had dug with hope, all he saw was what was missing. He knew now that this black emptiness in his soul couldn't be filled with a placebo burial.

They say you learn to live with loss. That it doesn't hurt so badly after a while. But when you have to pick and choose which hurt to ignore and which to live with, every day, it never gets old, and it never ends. You keep your head down, pick your battles and you only immerge victorious when you awake the next morning alive without having eaten your own gun. But what do you do when you can't forget? How do you carry on when the hurt that was supposed to get better over time, doesn't live inside you, but haunts your every breath?

You make it right.

The emotions, both old and new, scars burning, and wounds reopening. This night had been the quiet and unknown breaking point of all the wrongs that just hadn't been committed by the Marines. It had been twenty-seven years of war, terror, and suffering. He saw in his mind the friends that had been lost, the family that had been murdered. The artificial intelligence that witnessed the barbaric death of a little girl and became a vengeful god, ordering the merciless killing of all humanity, carried out by his armies of apathetic, soulless war machines. The man saw the horror and savagery of the mutated, ruined forms of life that ate the flesh of other humans. The atrocities carried out by traitors, _Grays_. A psychotic chemist with a voodoo skull painted on his face, top hat, and a hanged man's noose around the neck, always preying with mind control and fear. The dwarf with dueling inferiority and Napoleon complexes, compulsively attempting to prove his vastly superior intellect by designing death traps he tests on children. The criminal on death row, turned into Frankenstein perversions of half man, half machine. But most of all it was the obsessed and twisted aristocrat under the guise of a _Professor_ whose final move in a never ending chess game with humanities savor for the ownership of a cybernetic beauty was to fall into an energy bubble taking John Connor with him.

It all began to build inside him, the sorrow, the fear, the anger … the hatred. There had been a time though growing hazy every day that he had been happy, that they all had been happy. Together, the three of them had touched that bliss. But this heinous crime motivated by hatred and prejudice only served to remind him of that night when that happiness was fractured forever. The night the man lost his mother and father, one of body, and the other of soul. It served to remind him of the sinking trauma no child would ever forget when all they knew had been taken away, when a childhood ended before it even began. The security, the love, the peace, everything a small child had needed was robbed from his very heart and soul. A child who barely knew how to read thrust into a dark and violent world. It wasn't just two more deaths, a man and a cyborg. It wasn't two more bodies buried in the foundation of the rebuilding of a civilization, of a species. It was the last straw; the final notice to both Man and Machine that a bloody, destructive war must end.

The wind shifted from west to east, and the world became colder. There was something dangerous and primal in the air. It was shown when the avenger opened his eyes. Reaching deep down into his very soul, he touched within him the abyss. Pulling from those depths was a shadowed specter. Assembled from all the deepest and darkest of things a man can learn in war, Apathy, ruthlessness, vengeance, and the blackest of hatred for all you considered your enemy. There had only been one man who could control this specter that was within every Connor. He would warn his son that to summon this mindset, this personality within always came at a cost. What had inspired fear from John Connor's name had turned him very nearly into the enemy he fought. What had nearly killed Miles Dyson and his wife in their own home had scarred and haunted Sarah Connor for the rest of her days. But there was no turning back now.

It had to end.

There was a black abyss in dark emerald eyes that looked to the horizon over the ruins of a dead city. Within his hand the tarnished and beaten watch snapped shut violently within a clenched fist. He took only a moment to absorb the last fumes, the last sip of magic from the love that made him, before he turned to leave. His coat fluttered in the breeze. He was the last of a legacy, the impossible son of an improbable and true love …

And he had left all of it behind so he may kill a god and stop a war.

"Never Again."

* * *

**The Hanging Tree**

_Are you, are you  
Coming to the tree  
Where they strung up a man they say murdered three.  
Strange things did happen here  
No stranger would it be  
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree._

Are you, are you  
Coming to the tree  
Where the dead man called out for his love to flee.  
Strange things did happen here  
No stranger would it be  
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.

Are you, are you  
Coming to the tree  
Where I told you to run so we'd both be free.  
Strange things did happen here  
No stranger would it be  
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.

Are you, are you  
Coming to the tree  
Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me.  
Strange things did happen here  
No stranger would it be  
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.

**Lyrics: Suzanne Collins**

**Sung &amp; Composed: Adrisaurus**


	8. Epilogue: Born in the USA

**Epilogue**

_Born in the U.S.A_

There's a place downtown where the sound of back-breaking work and machinery roll on and on into the night. Bulldozers, picks, jack hammers, and drills, all hammering paths, flipping cement, and cutting aged metal. They're all sweaty and dirty men and women pushing through the ruins of eroded rebar and the corroded cinderblocks of a civilization that was wiped from the face of the earth long before they ever drew breath. Underneath this cemetery of powdered bones and brittle glass they find the strange and the unknown of a world they knew nothing about, and some they've only heard of. Corpses made of cybernetics, their inner workings dust contaminated, their metal bodies crumbling to rusty mounds when touched. They were all that remained of a war that their parents fought. That their grandparents started when this thing they call "A City" was once a living and breathing organism that housed, fed, and carried the desires and dreams of the people who called it home. The workers, the flesh and blood of the operation are all the amalgamation of the hopes and dreams of two generations. The deaths and sacrifices of all the yesterdays before were now resting squarely on their shoulders. But for now, they pick and strike at the remnants of the old world, clearing it all away to forge a path to a promise land that has no name, that is somewhere out there on the horizon of the many coming days.

But underneath progress there's a place that few know about, and yet it might have been the most important location in the entirety of the human race, once. It's easy to find, easy to miss, and all of the roads lead to it. Somewhere in the labyrinth of toppled concrete and forgotten deco towers are commuter rails that run through the decomposed and rotted muscle and tissue of this destroyed metropolis. From the bare mountain silhouettes against the full silvery moon that illuminated a tarnished and wrecked sign that only says "HOLLY", down to the inky black ocean that spilled over sea wall and barricade submerging with violent waves many a high end store and vacation home along the coast. Yet no matter where you are amongst this ruined and terrible nightmare, the yellow brick road is paved with iron and spike toward the Emerald City ….

Or what it had used to be.

Union Station sat at the heart of this ruined body. She was an old starlet on life support, barely conscious while her doctors discuss when it would be time to pull the plug. Cobwebbed decay and rust covered the once busy railway station. The Spanish architecture stained in scorch marks, while the red tiled roof lost shingles every day in age and disuse. Large buildings around it collapsed and spilled the shelled remains of the commuter engines. Their bodies crushed under fallen cinder block of a once so distinct skyline. Inside, its marble halls were covered in pressure fractures. Spider webbing fissures running across the grand ceiling. While on the floor, decade's worth of dust and soot covered fallen crystal chandeliers that had crashed on top of gashed leather seats and smashed ticket counters. The old clocks on the ramshackled walls were all frozen. Their hands will forever mark the time in every hemisphere when the world had ended.

It's not on the surface were you find this place, but below. It's behind the depression-era maintenance hatch. Down the ladder and into the old sewers where the trolley lines reside forgotten. There, follow the strings of light bulbs hung on the old electric cables. In the center of the old lines, a desk sits in the middle. A film of dusty pages, yellowed with age, will make out a roster book that lays untouched. Inside are the names and positions of men and women that a malicious artificial mind would've killed anyone it had too, to gain possession of it. Next to the desk sits a guard station where rusty latches for dog collars still hung on by a thread.

You'll hear it from the distance. It's all the way down the tunnel. The place where stained and thread bare blankets, rodent bones, abandoned rifles, hollow machine skulls turned spider nests, and smote fire pits line the walls and corridors for miles. It had been a place long sought after by many enemies during the last Great War, and many more innocent souls looking for shelter. This place had many names in the old days. But most notably amongst them was "Home Plate." It was a haunt of a man whose name still resonates even in these days — though some have claimed he never existed at all. It seemed hard to believe, but there was a time not so long ago that these tunnels had been the hub of all humanity. From here all you need to do is follow the blues, the rock, and the jazz to the source and you'll find it.

You'll find them.

If you get here just before nine, you can find a spot in the briefing room. Any later and you could be standing all night. No one knows exactly where they get the food or the worst tasting alcohol in the west, but they have it. Night after night the regular crowd trudges in. No one was under the age of thirty. It's not that they mind. It's just no one even remembers where this place is. Because no star eyed youth alive remembers how it used to be. When this place used to be something, mean something.

If you pull up a seat you can listen to them talk. A pretty gal in her golden years will serve you a drink. She used to be something back in the day. She says a doctor most nights, but shaking hands changed all that. If you give her enough, she'll tell you about a woman and a cyborg, out of time, that saved her family's life. How a man from the future delivered her daughter, sometimes it's her sister. Daughter, sister, it doesn't matter to this pretty old dame, because she loved her about the same. You can ask her about the girl, she'll smile and tell you that if she was still around, she wouldn't be here serving drinks. It might make you question her sanity, if she had seen too much and drank a little more. But no one at the bar ever questions her, ever thinks anything else about her story but truth. That's when you realize that all of them, every man and woman in this room had seen things. They had seen the terrible, the impossible, the great, and the inconceivable.

It's the same inside jokes they've traded a hundred times. The same tales of adventure through machine infested oceans. Stories of a traitorous Maharajah's endless jeweled fortune found underneath his ancient fortress were he jealously kept the last nuclear warhead from the savior of humanity. It's one right after the other— amazing stories, unbelievable tales of the impossible. Yet, they all seem undaunted. With each story they tell here every night, like clockwork, no one bats an eye. It's the 'been there done that' routine as always. For all the regulars here had walked amongst the myths and Legends of a period of time quickly falling from truth to mythology in the world above them.

They spend the balance of the evening, telling the old stories. Before long, they slip into reminiscing about the key players in them. They talk about two brothers —war heroes— both disappearing one day never to be seen from again. They talk about the oldest one reappearing to deliver a baby many years in the past … a daughter or a sister, she can't remember. There are always heated words over a certain unique cyborg. She was a mechanical creature of an unparalleled beauty that had once been the scorn of humanity, the enemy's greatest asset, and their only ally in the final days of the war. They argue over conspiracies, and the rumors of a great and forbidden romance between the cyborg and the greatest of the legendary heroes. Some say this cybernetic princess died with her godlike father on that last day. Others say she's still out there somewhere, looking to reap her vengeance upon them all. But those who knew best carried an unlikely fantasy that she and the greatest of heroes, had escaped the ruin of a gothic castle to live somewhere beautiful and solitary so they might die together as it should be.

The merits of this argument over this messiah's secret romance with a machine always come down to his upbringing, and the woman who did it all by herself. They had known the man personally, and each had a different perspective of him. They doubted and teased, told humorous and heroic stories of him over the years. He had truly been the best out of all of them. But when it came to his mother, the woman who sacrificed her son to all of humanity, so he might save them … there were no jokes to be found. They spoke of her with respect, with care, and with a reverence found only in a devote Catholic's home. Only one of them had ever met her, and when she tells the story every night they all hang on every word she says. All of them forever enamored with "The mother of the future" and her endless sacrifice for them all.

But eventually there is an awkward pause from all of them. It's uncomfortable, and you might never know why. All of these stories, all of these myths and legends from a life and times that seemed hardly imaginable … yet, there is only one they don't talk about. They don't talk about the last of that venerable family of legends and gods. They don't talk about the impossible child …

The Great Detective.

He had been one of them. But unlike the rest who had retired to relive, in a bottle, all that had been and never will be again underground. He could not let go. He's a vigilante – vicious and uncompromising. Above they fear and hate him, afraid of what he plans to do. His attacks on classified scientific bunkers and thefts of a malicious cybernetic god's research on time displacement had made all of the old veteran's targets of fear and suspicion. Above they'd rather believe that all that had happened in the war were just fantastic stories told by old timers, rather than to think how easily it could happen again. He's the last man standing, a fallen hero, spurred by the loss of a family he'd buried with his own hands. Forever convinced he could stop the war, determined beyond any reason that he had to stop it at any cost. It seemed impossible …

But so had been his creation.

They don't talk about him, though not out of spite or hatred. They don't talk about him, because they don't want to talk about the possibility. There wasn't enough hope in this collection of broken and hardened hearts to think about the success of this impossible plan. They feared as much as everyone above that just one tweak to the timeline, and they'd all be waking up one night to find themselves the last of humanity in the concentration camps of victorious machines. But they alone fear as much as they long for just one chance for a moment when all of this suffering and death was nothing but a bad dream. To wake up in their soft warm beds next to loved ones who had been lost for so long now they can't even remember their names. But whether it was fear or longing, it all was just too much to handle for those who had been through all the sorrows of this ruined world.

They don't think of such things anymore. All of them had done their jobs, done all the fighting and dying up there, so that they could live the rest of their lives down here where they had been reborn from hell's fires above. Now every night they come, sit, and talk of the past over a drink. Eventually in time, one by one, they'll stop coming, and only the rest will know why. But they'll come all the same, till there isn't anyone left …

There's a place downtown where the sound of back breaking work and machinery roll on and on into the night. And someday the jackhammers and drills will finish their jobs. On that day all that is left of the eroded ruins of this old world, and the last great war fought in its remains, will be nothing but sediment under foot of some new civilization. They'll create new life and lore bequeathed to them through the blood and suffering of all those that came before. Never remembering, never knowing that once … long ago ...

Legends, myths, and heroes all had walked these ruined streets side by side.

* * *

**Ozymandias**

_IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,  
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws  
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—  
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,  
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows  
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—  
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose  
The site of this forgotten Babylon._

_We wonder,—and some Hunter may express_  
_Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness_  
_Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,_  
_He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess_  
_What powerful but unrecorded race_  
_Once dwelt in that annihilated place_

_\- Horace Smith_

* * *

**Acknowledgements:**

_"Truth to Power" by Frank Miller_

_and_

_"Born in the U.S.A" - Bruce Springsteen_


End file.
